Peter Watt criticises Brown’s leadership

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Perhaps intended to influence the secret PLP ballot that never happened – which Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt had hoped would occur on Monday – the timing of Peter Watt’s broadside on Gordon Brown is another shot to the party at a delicate time.

Watt, the former General Secretary of the Labour Party under Tony Blair and until 2007, has said in a new book, press released to the Daily Mail for tomorrow:

* Douglas Alexander wanted an early election in 2007 because he feared delaying it would reduce the PM’s popularity. The quote is: “we have spent ten years working with this guy, and we don’t actually like him. We have always thought the longer the British public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well.”

* On the day the 2007 election was supposedly due to be called, limousines were ready to take ministers on the campaign trail — the election campaign was ready to go.

The first quote in particular is mindlessly – or deliberately – timed. But we should remember that these remarks are two years old. Like Peter Mandelson’s emails to Derek Draper they rake over some known knowns and some known unknowns at a very sensitive time: an election in 2007 was called off and there were – and no doubt still are – doubts about Gordon Brown in the cabinet as elsewhere.

The most disappointing, but not surprising, aspect of tonight’s revelations are how much of the party’s money – £1.2million – was misspent on an election that never was. That’s money that the party could have put towards the real thing.

But these revelations – no matter how harsh – should be lessons for the party as it prepares for an election that cannot be called off. They shouldn’t be allowed to distract from the important tasks, and will be forgotten as quickly as this week’s other events.

Tagged in: Movement, Election2010, History.