Inside the Brown operation: the loathing, the cluelessness and the sulks

Remember Peter Watt? No one in Team Brown did either –and that, it now turns out, was a big mistake. As general secretary of the Labour Party when the Blair-Brown handover happened (and cash-for-honours was in the air) he was in a brilliant position to know what went on. And, after being abandoned by all of them, he has a motive to tell. His revelations are pretty explosive, but this jumps out at me the most – from Douglas Alexander, the man everyone thought was Brown’s little Mowgli raised by a fellow son-of-the-manse in the jungle of politics. This is what Alexander (the would-be co-ordinator in the election that never was) had to say to Watt in 2007:

“The truth is, Peter, we have spent ten years working with this guy, and we don’t actually like him. We have always thought that the longer the British public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well.”