Inside Out by Peter Watt
Biteback, £16.99
The Labour Party has had some highly distinguished and effective general secretaries. Peter Watt was not one of them. I remember the first press conference given by Larry Whitty when he took over that post at an impossibly difficult time and being impressed by his quiet efficiency. Then there was Tom Sawyer, brought in by Tony Blair to prepare the party for the 1997 general election, to be followed by Margaret McDonagh, who managed to achieve an even better result.
Something went sadly wrong after that. The problem was that the leadership didn’t want anyone of individual strength or character, so they chose David Triesman, who didn’t work out, and then Matt Carter, who gave up after little more than a year.
Then came Peter Watt. When I heard of his appointment, I recall turning to a colleague and asking: “Who the hell is he?”
Now the world knows. He was a minor party official who had risen swiftly through the ranks and then gleefully accepted the poisoned chalice. He took over as the cash for honours scandal was breaking and, having survived that, was impaled in the furore over a major donor who was pouring a fortune into the coffers through jobbing employees, in breach of the whiter than white laws which Blair had introduced without any thought for the consequences on party funding.
Watt was forced out in disgrace with the threat of a criminal charge hanging over his head. And that might have been the end of him – yet another quickly-forgotten footnote in Labour’s tangled history. But his legacy is a fantastic book, the inside story of what it was like in the dying days of the Blair regime and the false dawn of Gordon Brown’s reign.
Peter Watt has, predictably, been accused of treachery. Of stabbing in the back the Labour Party which he professed to love and of selling the serial rights to the vilified Mail on Sunday. But why wouldn’t he? Not only is he getting in some very effective retaliation for the humiliation and hurt inflicted on him, but he is, through Inside Out, providing some invaluable information about how the party has reached its present parlous condition.
There are some lovely little cameos illustrating, lest we forget, the sheer cynicism of New Labour’s spin machine, such as the 30 “members of the public” who Tessa Jowell met at a motorway service station for the benefit of election publicity. Actually, they were all trusted party members bused in for the occasion.
Then there was the time Watt was ordered to go to a hospital which Blair was about to visit and find “half-a-dozen obviously sick children” for him to meet and be photographed with (and heal by the laying on of hands?)
Before he became general secretary, Watt was party treasurer which gave him an early insight into the financial madness of the party. Did you know, for example, that during the 2005 election there was a Make Poverty History rally at the Old Vic with live satellite links to “poor people in Africa and President Clinton in the US”? It’s not surprising if you hadn’t heard about it because, as Watt says: “It attracted virtually no media coverage even though it cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.” It was, he adds, “the ultimate vanity exercise”.
The problem for the party which Watt had to deal with as general secretary was “wild, grandiose over-spending” which could only be paid for by “the stupidity of relying on dodgy donors”. He sums this up by saying: “We were always pissing money away while our fate rested in the hands of a few multi-millionaires.”
Incidentally, all this was taking place while he was making 200 staff redundant in an attempt to stop the Labour Party going bankrupt.
The most brutal parts of the book are reserved for Gordon Brown. There has been a steady stream of stories about his eccentric and childish behaviour but Watt witnessed it at first hand. Most shocking of all was the dinner party at No 10 when he went into a sulk and walked out because his guests had sat down without his permission.
Peter Watt is justified in saying that no one could have coped with being general secretary of the Labour Party at that time but the truth is that someone with as little experience as he had was always going to find it impossible.
The leadership didn’t want anyone of stature, though. Both Blair and Brown have relegated the party to a tiresome appendix, there to provide the money (when the dodgy donors don’t) and the bodies at election time. You can’t feel sorry for any of them.
David Seymour
