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16 March 2013

Chris Huhne spent his last night of freedom watching me do karaoke to “Teenage Kicks”

Tom Watson's diary.

By Tom Watson

The fightback

To Easington, where I am the guest of Grahame Morris MP for the constituency annual dinner. Our backdrop was a new National Union of Mineworkers banner. Where once there was a pithead, the banner now portrays a newly built school with happy children excitedly leaping into their future.

I couldn’t help but be struck how these potent symbols of our past were being used to project a new hope for the coal communities. Which is perhaps why there was fury directed towards Michael Gove, who that week had attacked local schools for having “the smell of defeatism”. The working classes of Easington have been in plenty of battles, but on the evidence of last week they’ve never been defeated.

Then a post-midnight drive through the mist and fog to wake up in the rustic peace of Keswick for the Words by the Water festival, to discuss my book Dial M for Murdoch. I shared a dressing room with the Guardian’s indefatigable Polly Toynbee. “Why are your frontbenchers not more angry?” she asked me. She’s right. I resolved there and then to work with the team of grass-roots members who are organising more than 53 protests against the bedroom tax.

The paperback

The former Labour MP Chris Mullin says he thought the art of political debate was over until he started to address literary festivals. He’s not wrong. The audience was intensely interested in the fine detail of the Leveson proposals and kept me on my toes.

I was struck by how even the most politically aware audience has almost given up on Westminster. Trust in public institutions is at an all-time low. We’re going to have to address the trust deficit if we are to strengthen civil society post-hacking, post-MPs’ expen – ses, post-banking crisis.

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Jailhouse rock

The finest part of the weekend was the wedding of Charlotte Harris – the incisive media lawyer who cracked open the phone-hacking case – and her debonair fiancé, James Burr. Poor Chris Huhne was there, looking wistful. I couldn’t help thinking that spending your last night of freedom listening to me singing “Teenage Kicks” with a karaoke band would make prison seem a more tolerable fate. He got an eight-month sentence the next day. Even though he lied to a court, the sentence seemed hard for a scandal that started with a speeding offence.

Lazy Labour

Fair bit of ribbing wherever I’ve been about “Lazy Labour”, a nickname mentioned last week in an interview with Jim Murphy in this magazine. Reminded me of the old story about Roy Jenkins. The Balliol-educated son of the south Wales mineworkers’ leader, Jenkins had entered parliament in 1948, just as Nye Bevan was in the throes of founding the NHS.

In the smoking room one evening, it was suggested to Bevan that Jenkins, though clever and articulate, might be lazy. Bevan didn’t hesitate: “Lazy? Lazy?” he shrieked. “A boy from Abersychan with an accent like that – whatever he is, he’s not lazy.”

And Bevan was right. Whatever Jenkins was or wasn’t, the ensuing half-century proved beyond doubt: he wasn’t lazy.

The current “controversy” is almost equally amusing, and typically lazy. A classic mediadriven fuss over nothing, in which a Labour frontbencher making a perfectly reasonable point has his words twisted to resemble an attack on (of all people) me.

Changing times

In the brouhaha over Murphy, some central points – on which we all agree – have been entirely overlooked. On one level, the “debate” has been couched in terms that have romanticised the New Labour era. And yet sentimental attachment to old dictums is the very antithesis of everything that Tony Blair and New Labour were about.

Media critics attempting to beat Ed Mili – band with this stick are not just wrong, but incoherent in their own terms. Not only is it wrong to go back to the past, no sane person has ever said that and nobody is saying it now.

The interpretation that media critics have been putting on the word “segmentation”, as though it were a divisive strategy, is dis – ingenuous. Unless you have either a single voter, or 60 million unrelated individual voters, somewhere in the middle you always have groups of voters. To talk to them is hardly to abandon the middle ground.

Stuck in the middle

Most preposterous of all, bored pundits have tried to present some Labour colleagues as believing that appealing to disillusioned Lib Dem voters is some kind of exclusive, zerosum strategy. I don’t believe (and I don’t say this lightly) any Labour MP is that stupid.

Lib Dem activists may well be a crazy sect of staring-eyed obsessives but their voters are anything but. They are slap-bang in the middle of the national mainstream. Millions of them now feel betrayed by the Lib Dems and are looking for a new home. Failure to compete for that group of people would be an abrogation of serious politics and a dereliction of duty.

What the media pundits really mean is that Ed is too left-wing. The Daily Mail and the Sun won’t be happy until Ed fights the election on a right-wing agenda, which goes further right than Blair, and probably in some cases than the Tories.

The one thing Tony taught us is not to be sentimental about the past. We can’t just repeat what happened in the Nineties and expect the old magic to work again.

Blair was not electorally successful because he was right-wing, he was successful because he was right – particularly on some of the important socio-economic issues in the early days.

You win elections by talking to all the people about the things that matter most to them, by giving them a real choice, by being right for the time. Every Labour frontbencher knows that. Bring on 2015.

Tom Watson is the MP for West Bromwich East and deputy chair of the Labour Party

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