Tom Watson is running late. When he materialises after 15 minutes he explains that he was with Neil Kinnock – never a man short of words – discussing how to secure the future of the Labour Party archive at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. It’s a reminder of Watson’s deep roots in the party: aged 17 he first worked as a £5,400-a-year trainee library assistant at Labour’s Walworth Road headquarters.
Decades of service followed until, in 2019, Watson stood down as deputy leader and as MP for West Bromwich East, citing the “brutality and hostility” he endured during the Corbyn era. Since then he has lived an itinerant existence: serving as chair of UK Music, becoming Britain’s trade envoy to South Korea (he is learning the language) and, alongside Prince Harry, receiving substantial damages from Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers for “unwarranted intrusion” into his private life by the News of the World.
Having lost eight stone and reversed his type 2 diabetes – friends referred to him as “FFB” or “former fat bastard” – Watson regained weight during his treatment for prostate cancer (“you can’t lift weights or ride a bike”) but says with pride that it is “coming off again”. Now 58, he has moved from his native Midlands to west Yorkshire where he spends weekends in his garden, plays video games and devours books – recent favourites include The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich and Oliver Moody’s Baltic: The Future of Europe (having bought a campervan he is contemplating a tour of the region next year). But it is politics that is now drawing Watson back in.
We meet at 6-7 Old Palace Yard, the stone-grey Georgian townhouse in Westminster which contains his House of Lords office. Watson entered the chamber in 2022 having previously been rejected by the vetting commission for promoting false sex abuse allegations against the late Conservative home secretary Leon Brittan (he used his maiden speech to “apologise unreservedly”). “Provided I stay on the red carpet and keep off the green carpet my stress levels are very low,” he says. “It’s only when I talk to our MPs that my anxiety levels rise”.
In a recent Sunday Mirror column that drew much comment in Labour circles, Watson lamented that he has “stopped sending private notes to the Prime Minister because he never replies. I’m not even sure his team pass them on.” Keir Starmer has, he reveals, since sent several replies but Watson is still troubled by what he heard from backbenchers, warning that Labour has a “giant HR and culture problem”.
“MPs described to me how they were treated and it really shocked me,” he says, recalling last summer’s rebellion over welfare cuts. “They said special advisers were ringing them up and telling them how to vote and threatening them with deselection. And I just thought to myself, if a special adviser had rung me up at any point in my 20 years in parliament I would have told them to F-off and so would every other MP.
“Delegating Spads to do ministerial work on persuasion is very bad politics and it was on the cabinet to sort it out. If they carry on doing that the Parliamentary Labour Party will be a very hard beast to govern in the midterm. If I’m giving any advice to Keir, Rachel [Reeves] and the other senior cabinet ministers it’s this: do not allow Spads anywhere near the political management of legislation in parliament.”
Throughout the New Labour years Watson was a militantly loyal Brownite, leading the “curry house coup” against Tony Blair in 2006 – plotted from the Bilash Tandoori in Wolverhampton – by organising a letter against the prime minister and resigning from government.
“It was a riot, not a coup,” quips Watson. “All I can say is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown [who Watson remains close to] were very personally supportive of me when I was deputy leader and really helped me understand how to try and keep Labour MPs and the party together.
“I feel anxious about the way the riot took place and were I 10 years older it might not have happened that way. But you can’t unwish the past and that’s what happened.”
Does Watson believe the briefing wars of today – which saw No 10 sources accuse Wes Streeting of plotting a coup – are worse than the Blair-Brown years? “Yes, and I can’t quite believe I’m saying that because it was pretty intense in those times. But it’s nothing compared to what you see now.”
Rather like the US and the Soviet Union, the Blairites and the Brownites had rules of engagement but today’s briefings, Watson says, “seem pretty lawless”. Streeting, he adds, was “grievously attacked, I agree with Wes that whoever did it should be sacked”.
The Times’s Patrick Maguire wrote recently that Starmer lacks “merciless enforcers” and a “praetorian guard” comparable to Watson and his Brownite brothers. But the man himself argues that the Prime Minister needs something else.“We need fewer brutal enforcers, not more. What we need are emotionally intelligent, thoughtful people who can listen to MPs and make sure that good and timely decisions are made at the corporate core and that the Prime Minister is fully aware of feeling on legislation as it develops. That was how No 10 under Tony and Gordon operated.
“Both of them spent a considerable amount of their personal time face-to-face with MPs who had concerns. There were times when they had very high politics, global politics, distracting them but they knew that Labour members gave them their jobs and that Labour MPs were the source of their power and their longevity as leaders and they took it very seriously. Their ministers were expected to do the same.
“But actually over the last month things have begun to change,” he concedes (Amy Richards, No 10’s new political director, has made better communication with MPs a priority). “I think there’s an understanding that the apparatus for decision-making wasn’t strong enough.”
During his time as deputy leader Watson served in Labour’s shadow cabinet and was bound by collective responsibility (a sometimes flexible concept under Corbyn). He believes Starmer has made a mistake by allowing Lucy Powell to hold the same post from the backbenches and challenge government policy.
“Lucy looks very happy on the backbenches and probably welcomes being able to, dare I say, represent members with greater force than perhaps she could were she bound by collective responsibility. She does it very adroitly and with patience but I’m not sure it was in Keir’s interests to allow that to happen.”
Labour is currently averaging just 18 per cent in opinion polls, its lowest sustained rating in history, a plight that Watson traces back to the party’s “loveless landslide” last year.
“The real issue that I think this government has was a day-one issue which is legitimacy and we’ve got 60 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons from a third of voters. So even without the current difficulties with the economy, politically that was always going to be difficult.”
In this new seven-party era, Watson questions whether first-past-the-post is sustainable. “Do we need to change the voting system? I’m not advocating that but I think a system in which no party is getting even close to a majority of voters can’t carry on forever.”
What of Labour’s future? Watson is complimentary of several of the main contenders to replace Starmer, perhaps as soon as next year. “She was too important to the movement for it to lose her contribution so early on in this government,” he says of Angela Rayner, a fellow former trade unionist, who succeeded him as deputy leader in 2020. “There are several potential future leaders out there and she’s clearly one of them.”
He is equally warm towards Shabana Mahmood whose father, the former chair of Birmingham Labour, used to host Watson and other Midlands stalwarts at his house. “They’re a lovely family. To see Shabana develop into a very substantial figure in British politics is genuinely a joy.
“She struck a balance in an authentic voice in a tough policy area [immigration] that isn’t going to yield political results overnight but that in the long term will put things in the right place and all credit to her for having the courage to do that.”
His advice to Andy Burnham, meanwhile, is to bide his time. “If he wants to be a leader I’d rather see him be an MP first and play a significant role in cabinet instead of getting here to challenge Keir.” Watson has been on both sides of coup attempts. Before the 2019 Labour conference he survived a move by Jeremy Corbyn’s allies to abolish the post of deputy leader (Blair, ironically, was among his defenders).
Starmer, he believes, can yet prevail but only if he changes. “Review your personal time, review your diary and make sure your team allocate plenty of time for you to build relationships with all your MPs. It may feel unnatural and uncomfortable at first but you will actually be enriched by it because they will give you the ideas and the energy you need to get through difficult times.”
Does he believe that Starmer, who has spent a sixth of his time abroad since becoming Prime Minister, is too rarely in the UK?
“No, in fact I think the current global climate requires him to be abroad. And the work he’s done building early relationships with European leaders and with President Trump is going to stand this country in good stead, so I’m not saying it’s easy.”
But nearly two decades after his “riot” against Blair, he ends with a word of warning to Starmer: “ignore your MPs at your peril”.
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