Glasgow Cathcart by-election 2005

'It almost goes without saying that Watson's qualifications consisted of years as a trade union official, first with ASTMS and later with the MSF union. His enduring concern for workers' rights manifested itself in his "rude and aggressive" manner to staff at Prestonfield on the night of his crime - the classic conduct of a Holyrood beggar on horseback. The other aspects of his career, such as his serial discarding of wives, were likewise of a pattern we have come to recognise in our Labour rulers.' Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday, 4 th September 2005.

Elementary Watson still eligible to take parliaments for a ride

By Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday 4 th September 2005

SO FAREWELL then, My Lord Watson of Infernoglory. You carried the torch for socialism, but this is the final curtain. You were a safe pair of hands except when they were holding a box of Swan Vestas. If ever there was an icon of Scottish Labour politics it is surely you. In your career and demeanour we see the complete encapsulation of the New Scotland.

"I categorically deny any wrongdoing," was the defiant response of Lord Watson to the charge of fire-raising at Prestonfield House Hotel last November. By Thursday of last week he had fine-tuned that spin to: "Guilty." How else would we expect a Labour politician to conduct himself, in a sticky corner, than by the traditional Blairite resort of lying - blatantly, remorselessly, futilely?

The context of the crime is not without significant symbolism: it was perpetrated at the Scottish Politician of the Year awards dinner, the climacteric annual occasion when the complicit media and their cronies in the political consensus foregather to freeload in a mutual admiration society that defies reality as hydrogen defies gravity. While the organisers retain sufficient sense of the boundaries of credibility not to employ the term 'statesman', the very notion of presenting awards to the rabble of ex-councillors, union apparatchiks and similar socialist detritus that pillage and bully us would be absurd anywhere outside the hothouse atmosphere of the Scottish progressive consensus.

In that rebarbative environment Lord Watson was a fish in water. The oratorical bouquets; the pretence that men and women who, in a real parliament of a developed western democracy, would fail to qualify as janitors, let alone ministers, are in some way statesmanlike achievers; the whole Disneyland of devolved delusion - all represented precisely the ambience in which Watson had his being. The stark incompetent promoted by the Labour machine far above his abilities, first as MP for Glasgow Central, then as a peer of the realm and finally as MSP for Glasgow Cathcart, might be taken as a parable of Scottish Labour.

It almost goes without saying that Watson's qualifications consisted of years as a trade union official, first with ASTMS and later with the MSF union. His enduring concern for workers' rights manifested itself in his "rude and aggressive" manner to staff at Prestonfield on the night of his crime - the classic conduct of a Holyrood beggar on horseback. The other aspects of his career, such as his serial discarding of wives, were likewise of a pattern we have come to recognise in our Labour rulers.

Most of the public regarded the battle in Glasgow Govan between Watson and Mohammed Sarwar as an archetypal Labour turf war in which diamond cut diamond and the two opponents deserved each other. The point at which Watson's career took on a surreal tinge was when Jack McConnell displayed his usual fine judgment in appointing him Minister of Culture, Tourism and Sport. During his two years in that post his only memorable achievement was to secure Euro 2008 for Austria and Switzerland.

There was also his peerage, which was awarded him by Tony Blair as a douceur after the Govan debacle. He retains that, despite having pled guilty to a criminal offence. That means a convicted fire-raiser has the right to sit in parliament and pass laws binding on the rest of us. It appears this is quite acceptable to a New Labour establishment that was too fastidious to allow clever and dedicated men without a blot on their characters, who happened to be hereditary peers, to legislate for us.

Recently, some Labour MPs were agitating for a new law to deprive of their titles peers guilty of serious criminal offences. This was done in a spirit of party rancour, targeted at Jeffrey Archer. It remains to be seen if they will be so anxious to pursue this course now that one of their own would be taken out by friendly fire.

In the meantime, Watson remains eligible to make laws, even to introduce a private member's bill - a ploy of which he already has catastrophic experience. He is also entitled to draw an attendance allowance of £192 a day, an overnight allowance of £128, plus travel expenses. Then there are his pension rights from the two parliaments he has ornamented and his ministerial service, believed to be in the region of £15,000. As Henry McLeish demonstrated, there is financial life after political death.

It would be easy to shrug one's shoulders and dismiss the career of Watson - the Janus-faced politician who famously campaigned to retain a hospital's A & E department, but voted in parliament to close it - as just another instance of devolved buffoonery. Yet such people do harm before they are brought down. Lord Watson's anti-hunting legislation - a cause in which he admitted he had no real interest - has wrecked the lives of poor people in rural areas.

It has also replaced the humane killing of unfit foxes by one bite on the neck from a hound with the cruel uncertainty of guns, indiscriminate in the quality of the foxes killed and always with the possibility of a wounded animal dying a long and agonising death from gangrene and starvation. Yet that irresponsible melange of ignorance and loutish prejudice (cf Cathy Jamieson in the hunting debate: "We used tae pit weans up chimneys!") that is the Scottish parliament, imposed its untutored will on rural Scotland.

The hunting community at least now has cause to celebrate. They will be opening the champagne in Fife and the Borders, sounding the call in salute to Watson, uber-clown among Holyrood's menagerie of buffoons: "Gone away!"