Tom Watson has been mired in controversy recently, following last week’s Panorama documentary raising doubts about the Dolphin Square paedophile ring allegations. The allegation is that he abused his position using parliamentary privilege to highlight rape allegations being made against Leon Brittan. Following an intervention by David Cameron, Watson has now hit back swinging, arguing that the people who deserve an apology are the victims of abuse.
There’s a risk that the issue has now become so hopelessly politicised that we may never see any justice coming out of it. I agree with Watson, up to a point. The focus really needs to be on helping the victims of abuse, not the reputations of politicians.
Where I depart from Watson’s analysis is that I’m not convinced the victims’ interests have been best served by Exaro and Watson’s intervention. There appears to have been pressure on child abuse victims to identify Leon Brittan, Harvey Proctor et al despite a paucity of actual evidence. Getting them justice is one thing; using them to target VIPs, using fallout from the Jimmy Savile atrocity as cover is quite another. Using survivors of child abuse to advance your political agenda and career is a pretty egregious act. So excuse me if I resist the temptation to pick Watson’s side in this latest row (or any side at all for that matter).
The thing with Tom Watson is that he has form. In 2004, Watson ran Liam Byrne’s by-election campaign in Birmingham Hodge Hill. The “pro-technology” MP ran a campaign attacking the Lib Dem candidate for being too pro-phone masts. Somewhat more notoriously, his England flag-adorned, anti-immigrant leaflets managed the feat of uniting both Nick Cohen and the Socialist Worker Party in condemnation.
As a party activist at the time, one of the most striking aspects of the Tom Watson era of by-election campaigning was the practice of following rival candidates around with mobs. It reached the point where candidates had to be surrounded by an entourage at all times ready to protect the candidate. It may be Jeremy Corbyn who is identified with the sort of behaviour we saw outside the Conservative Party conference last week, but Watson has been a keen proponent of this tactic in the past – except in his case this had nothing to do with keeping an issue in the public eye but a more straightforward form of intimidation and bullying.
The thing is, if you follow his career, Watson is quite partial to the mob. Whether it is the hacking scandal or child abuse, wherever there is a large amount of righteous moral outrage, Watson unfailingly places himself at the centre of it. With his more recent campaigns, we can at least console ourselves that the targets tend to be the powerful, but his practice remains the same; stoking up anger and hyperbole rather than being the voice of reason.
Like a lot of people, I suspect Tom Watson’s affinity for moral indignation has a little bit too much to do with what he gets out of it than the issues themselves, and it is fair to say that he has done very well out of the campaigns he has tied himself to. But it is reasonable to question whether demagogues really have the people they are superficially championing at heart.