You could not call him deflated ... it wouldn’t reflect his waist
sees the Labour deputy squirming before MPs
WHAT foul- polluted waters we waded through yesterday afternoon when various police, the chief prosecutor and Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson appeared before the Commons home affairs select committee – an organ itself chaired by, ye gods, Keith Vaz.
Having endured a couple of hours of it, I felt like a guillemot dipped in an oil slick. Take me to a bird rescue bubble-bath pronto, please.
A middle-ranking policeman, solid as a white-bread bacon sandwich, said he had been shunted to non-duties after failing to satisfy Mr Watson in the latter’s pursuit of alleged rape suspect Lord Brittan (RIP).
This copper, Detective Chief Inspector Paul Settle, said the Watsonian pursuit of ex-Tory Cabinet minister Brittan had been a ‘baseless witch hunt’. DCI Settle felt ‘betrayed’ by the highly political Watson, who had gone scampering off to Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders to complain about him.
‘What are you doing now?’ asked Mr Vaz with excessive unction. ‘Not a great deal,’ grunted sometime Scotland Yard ace DCI Settle, who even as we speak may be measuring up for a traffic warden’s uniform.
Two more senior police officers, smarmy careerists (one of them wore the sort of spectacles previously found only on marketing men), failed to offer convincing evidence that the force had not caved in to Mr Watson. Behind them, even as they gave this evidence, glowered the square form of Watson, sitting right next to Ms Saunders. He and she chatted intimately, quite like old friends.
There was once a time when the Director of Public Prosecutions would strive to keep a distance from controversial politicians.
Mr Watson eventually lumbered to the witness table. Last week he had been indignantly defiant in the Commons Chamber when asked to apologise to the Brittan family. No way would he say sorry. Nope. The political elite should feel shame that any sex abuse victims felt neglected.
Yesterday we saw a change of tack. Mr Watson, assembling his features into something approximating remorse, mewed up a few sorrys for the way Leon Brittan’s family was made to suffer. You will recall that Lord Brittan, a Cabinet minister of the Thatcher era, was pursued by the cops in his final months of life. They, exhorted ever onwards by a sweating Watson, interviewed Lord Brittan under caution over a rape allegation which proved to be false. Lord Brittan died of cancer before they admitted that, mind you. The soft-spoken Watson we saw yesterday, sitting at the table an ostensibly contrite pudding, rotating his pudgy fingers and huskily pleading an ear infection, was barely recognisable as the same Labour MP who in the hot, high months of child-abuse hysteria so feverishly spoke of Establishment cover-ups.
We will not say that Mr Watson was deflated. That would not reflect accurately his waistline. He did admit that he was ‘sorry for the hurt caused to Lord Brittan’. He did express ‘regret’ for repeating a claim that the innocent Lord Brittan was ‘as close to evil as any human being could get’. BuT was his sorrow truthful? Did he convey genuine regret? The theatre critic in me felt that the performance fell some way short of full dramatic truth. In the public seats sat Lord Prescott. The old fool started harrumphing while Tory MPs questioned Mr Watson. Mr Vaz had to tell him to shut up.
Mr Vaz expressed some surprise that Mr Watson was so close to the police investigation. ‘You’re not Sherlock Holmes, are you?’ he asked. No, he is Watson.
But Mr Watson may have fancied himself a great detective. How rum that this same man, so prominent in the Levesonian terrors, persecuted Fleet Street journalists for their standards of accuracy and their human decency.
James Berry (Con, Kingston) put it succinctly when he suggested that the interests most keenly pursued by Mr Watson were not those of justice or alleged sexabuse victims, but ‘ your own political interests’. And now he is deputy leader of HM Opposition. Mud works.