Tom watson

Last week, the Greens released ‘Change the Tune’, a party political broadcast on YouTube. It features actors playing Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage all singing in harmony. All four men are indistinguishable from one another. Ukip and the Lib Dems are the same, went the message. Only the Greens are different. Met with wild adulation from Green supporters and bewildered scepticism from more-or-less everyone else, the video has been the most high profile video of the campaign so far. Buckle up – it’s time for viral politics. YouTube and other platforms hosting political videos side-by-side with popular culture will play a significant role in this election. This is not particularly controversial. Political videos are

Labour have continued their bizarre war on the media with aplomb. As Mr S has reported in the past, pesky journalists that have the audacity to ask awkward questions are given the full hairdryer treatment from the audience at Labour’s set piece events. Today’s speech by Tony Blair was no different: This Tony Blair event very nostalgic. A member of the audience even called me “Tory scum” for asking a question. — James Landale (@BBCJLandale) April 7, 2015 Modern trait of crowd booing journalists who ask the most relevant questions. Expect more of it to come. #Blair — Chris Gibson (@ChrisGibsonNews) April 7, 2015 All stirred up by the party’s

Fight! Two senior Labour MPs locked horns yesterday over the Scottish leadership contest. Ivan Lewis and Tom Watson scrapped after the latter wrote a piece endorsing left-leaning Neil Findlay for the leadership. Lewis tweeted shortly after Watson promoted his piece that ‘it’s essential that Scots decide best person to be leader of Scottish Labour. Others interfering not in the interests of the Labour Party’. Watson took this as it was clearly meant and dived straight in with a retort: ‘Presumably you’d rather they quietly elect your candidate whilst we all watch. Plus ça change.’ This is ostensibly a debate between the two men about rival candidates in the contest for

Does it matter that the Tories can’t spell out how they’d fund the tax cuts they announced at their party conference this week? Labour has launched a clock which monitors how long it’s been since David Cameron promised these cuts without any detail on how they’d pay for them. But last night on BBC This Week, Tom Watson summed up why the Tories feel they can make this attack: ‘I don’t think we can be more austere than the Tories now: I thought those freezes were cruel last week and will have very bad social consequences and the Labour party doesn’t believe in that, and so we’ve got to make

When Tom Watson left the Labour frontbench, he was fulsome in praise (in the correct sense of the phrase) for his leader. But since then, he’s not exactly been trying that hard to keep Ed Miliband in a state of zen-like calm. He told the Marr Show this morning that he would support Adam Afriyie’s troublemaking amendment to the EU referendum bill: ‘I don’t want to add to the PM’s panic but I will probably be supporting Adam Afriyie with his amendments so… I think there are a lot of people on both sides of the House who think we need clarity on this now. And the country has asked

Ed Miliband needs to reassure his backbenchers that he does indeed have a good plan after the GMB union announced it was cutting its affiliation funds to the party by 90 per cent. But someone else already has a plan: and it looks strangely like one that will cause the Labour leader a bit of grief. Tom Watson has this morning written a blog in which he suggests that ending the link between the party and the unions ‘is a very serious development that threatens a pillar of our democracy that has endured for over one hundred years’.  He writes: ‘Over the next year we have been asked to consider

Decca Aitkenhead has a history of producing revelatory August interviews that make tricky reading for the Labour leadership. Her 2008 interview with Alistair Darling involved the journalist following him around during the August recess and unleashed the ‘forces of hell’ against the then Chancellor when it was published. Her interview with Tom Watson in today’s Guardian fits in with that tradition. Watson argues that there is no case for Unite to answer over Falkirk: Watson thinks on all three counts his party got it wrong. “I thought it was silly to report the allegations to the police, bordering on wasting police time.” The whole affair, he insists, is “a storm

Tom Watson might be preparing to fly half round the world to continue his fight against Rupert Murdoch. But Ed Miliband has still not named a replacement for Watson as Labour’s campaign coordinator. It was thought that the contest for this role was between Michael Dugher, who was part of Watson’s team and is the choice of the Labour machine, and Douglas Alexander, the shadow Foreign Secretary, who ran Labour’s 2010 general election campaign and David Miliband’s leadership bid. Vernon Coaker, who is in line for promotion from the Northern Ireland brief in the coming reshuffle, was also considered a contender. But Patrick Wintour reports that two new names have

Tom Watson’s resignation from the shadow Cabinet won’t draw a line under the row about Unite’s influence over Labour. But, rather, it will escalate it. This is now a serious enough issue to have drawn a shadow Cabinet resignation. Watson’s self-indulgent resignation letter makes clear that he’s going partly because of Blairite criticism. As he puts it, ‘There are some who have not forgiven me for resigning in 2006’. This puts the whole Blairite / Brownite narrative back at the heart of Labour politics. It is a reminder that a party does something awful to its soul when it removes a totemic, election winning Prime Minister mid-term.  I also suspect

Tom Watson’s Twitter feed has gone a bit quiet recently. Strange, as he is normally quite vocal about media ethics and their failings. But his silence is well-judged: when he stood up in PMQs and referred to a ‘a powerful pedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10’ and referred to ‘senior aide of a former Prime Minister’ he started a massive and tawdry guessing game, just as the Newsnight investigation did. And was his evidence any stronger? Harriet Harman has just been asked on BBC Sunday Politics, and she didn’t know. For those who missed it, here’s Watson’s PMQs intervention: listen to ‘Tom Watson’s allegations in PMQs’ on Audioboo

After Lord McAlpine’s statement this morning about the allegations and rumours of child abuse surrounding the Tory peer and other figures, Tory MP Rob Wilson has gone on the warpath and written a stern letter to Tom Watson, who first raised the possibility of a paedophile ring linked to Number 10. Wilson doesn’t hold back in the letter, which you can read in full here: ‘MPs can and do play a vital role in bringing such matters to public attention. However, as a result of your repeated and sensationalist public claims of the involvement in abuse of a ‘senior aide of a former Prime Minister’, ‘a former cabinet minister’, and

I gather that self-important Labour MP Tom Watson has earned £10,812 in royalties for the book he recently co-authored on phone-hacking, Dial M For Murdoch. New parliamentary records show that Watson claims to have devoted 175 hours to the project. Despite shunning an advance from publisher Allen Lane, this means the MP has still made an average of £61 per hour for his work so far – a figure that will increase if the book continues to sell. There is no mention in the latest Register of MPs’ financial interests, where Watson has made the disclosure, of this cash being donated to charity or good causes. Surely Watson is not