Spied on by his own side, tainted bruiser addicted to scheming
TOM WATSON’S reputation as an inveterate Westminster schemer was forged in the dying days of Tony Blair’s regime. During a secret meal at a Wolverhampton curry house in 2006, Mr Watson orchestrated a mass resignation of aides – and forced Mr Blair to set a date for leaving No 10.
Scroll forward 13 years, and Mr Watson was dining in the Sweet Mandarin Chinese restaurant in Manchester on Friday when he says he first heard about the attempt to abolish his post of deputy leader.
Labour’s wheel has turned so far since the ‘Balti’ plot that Mr Blair – who now occupies the same anti-Corbynista, pro-Remain wing of the party as Mr Watson – described the attempted coup as ‘undemocratic, damaging and politically dangerous’.
Jeremy Corbyn suspects Mr Watson, 52, of trying to topple him by planning to head a new ‘Government of national unity’ if the Brexit crisis leads to Boris Johnson’s Government falling next month – and forcing out Mr Corbyn in the process.
Mr Corbyn’s tactical retreat yesterday, when he was forced to quash the Momentum-inspired motion, shows that Mr Watson still remains a force within the party, despite being comprehensively marginalised by the leadership and tainted by the uproar over his pursuit of political grandees over false allegations of sex abuse.
Mr Watson’s reputation has been undeniably damaged by his role in helping to fan a national witch-hunt in 2012 when he claimed that there was a ‘powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10’.
It led to the hounding of public figures such as former Home Secretary Lord Brittan who Mr Watson described as being as being ‘as close to evil as any human could get’ after he died.
The ‘VIP paedophile ring’ was a figment of the imagination of Carl Beech, a fantasist who was convicted of fraud earlier this years and sentenced to 18 years.
After weeks avoiding the media in the wake of the Beech trial, the attempted Corbynista coup flushed him on to the airwaves yesterday, where he gave a grudging half-apology for the suffering of Beech’s victims, but insisted that he was only ‘trying to establish whether very powerful people who had great influence were treated differently by the criminal justice system’.
Mr Watson’s reputation has also been indelibly tarnished by his association with disgraced racing tycoon Max Mosley, the former boss of Formula One’s governing body who gave £500,000 in donations to Labour while campaigning to insulate prominent figures from scrutiny by newspapers.
Mr Watson has refused all demands to return the ‘contaminated’ money, even after the discovery of a 1960s leaflet linking immigrants with disease, which listed Mr Mosley as its publisher.
Mr Watson was elected as Labour’s deputy leader in September 2015 by the party membership – giving him the authority of an independent mandate during his increasingly frequent clashes with Mr Corbyn in the wake of the 2016 EU referendum.
While Mr Watson is a committed Remainer who supports a second referendum, Mr Corbyn is a life-long campaigner against the EU who has infuriated Mr Watson with his incoherent and vacillatory Brexit policy and his seeming inability to get to grips with the anti- semitism rows which have shaken the party.
Their feud erupted in public at last year’s Labour conference, when Mr Watson was humiliated when he was denied a speaking slot on the platform. A subsequent attempt by Mr Watson to create a breakaway ‘social democrat’ group in the party fizzled out. The conflicts have been rendered even more toxic by the feud between Mr Watson and his former flatmate Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary who bankrolls Mr Corbyn’s party and shares the leader’s scepticism about t he EU. Mr McCluskey’s close friend Karie Murphy, the executive director of Mr Corbyn’s office, has been identified by allies of Mr Watson as one of the architects of the attempt to remove the deputy leader. Bruiser Mr Watson, who once weighed in 22 stone but lost seven after a diet, insists that the first he knew about the putsch against him was during his Chinese meal.
If so, it represents an uncharacteristic failure of intelligence gathering by the deputy, who is famed for having spies across the party and an unparalleled grasp of Labour’s levers of power.
EVEN he has found it hard to stay fully plugged-in across the party while he has been cut out of all major policy and personnel decisions by the leader’s office. Instead, he has become the one being spied on.
According to one party source, Mr Corbyn’ s supporters in Momentum have taken office space in the same building as Mr Watson’s constituency office in West Bromwich in order to report back about him.
Mr Watson insists that his motivation for making radical dietary changes – including putting butter in his coffee – came from reading about Labour politicians who had died early.
Even after his diet, Mr Watson is still referred to in the bars of Westminster as the ‘fat man’, a Mafiastyle nickname reflecting his power as a backroom enforcer.
Whether this moniker survives his head-on crash with Mr Corbyn remains to be seen.