Glasgow Cathcart by-election 2005

'At 19, Watson was fined £3 for breach of the peace at Perth Police Court after a drunken brawl in the town's High Street late on a Saturday night.' Tom Gordon and Iain Wilson, in the Herald, 2 nd September 2005.

Reckless streak marked him from early age

By Tom Gordon and Iain Wilson, in the Herald 2 nd September 2005

WHEN Lord Watson of Invergowrie jigged at his third wedding last year there was more than a hint of dark humour in his choice of music Ð Wild Thing.

For, although he has tried to hide it through his career, Michael Goodall Watson has possessed a reckless streak from a young age.

Born in Cambuslang in 1949 to a comfortable, middle-class family, he grew up in the quiet village of Invergowrie, just west of Dundee. His parents, Clark and Agnes, were Tories, and sent him to Dundee High School, the city's only fee-paying school.

By his late teens, he was "a typical rugger bugger" according to one friend, carousing in pubs, getting argumentative after a drink, and putting people in headlocks for laughs Ð though few appreciated the joke.

One friend said recently: "He could be violent with a drink in him, and seemed to enjoy inflaming situations."

At 19, Watson was fined £3 for breach of the peace at Perth Police Court after a drunken brawl in the town's High Street late on a Saturday night.

In the early 1970s, Watson left Dundee to study at Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh, joining the Young Communist League and becoming involved in campus politics. Halfway through his course, aged 23, he married for the first time. Maureen Ash was the 21-year-old daughter of a railway driver from Dundee's Douglas scheme, and friends thought her an odd match for the public school boy.

After graduating with a lower second in 1974, Watson and his wife moved to Derbyshire for his job as an adult education teacher, which was followed by work as an official with a white-collar union.

However, while Watson's career flourished, his marriage soured and he returned to Scotland in 1979, the year of his first divorce. In the early 1980s he moved up the Labour ranks in Scotland, earning a reputation as serious and ambitious, but also vain, cold and "not as bright as he thought".

Confident of his own charms, he was also known as a ladies' man. Between liaisons, union work and Labour meetings, Watson wrote Rags to Riches, the official history of Dundee United FC. He claimed to have been a fan since the age of 10 but in fact had been a Rangers supporter before converting at university.

In 1986 he married Lorraine McManus, a council housing officer, and they set up home on Glasgow's south side, and three years later his political break came with the sudden death of Bob McTaggart, Labour MP for Glasgow Central.

Watson's victory in the resulting by-election was the start of eight unrewarding years in opposition. In Year Zero, his book about the early days of the Scottish Parliament, Watson even titled one chapter "Anything but WestminsterÉ" In it he bemoaned its slow pace, its anachronistic rituals, and the frequent "dreadful" speeches.

But the distaste was mutual and among Labour MPs Watson is recalled largely for his vanity. "Without it he would have been a nonentity," said one.

In 1995, however, Watson's love of Westminster was rekindled by the boundary commission abolishing his seat. Suddenly, he was desperate to stay, and so began the fight for Labour's nomination in Glasgow Govan. Like many in the party, Watson initially underestimated the eventual winner, Mohammad Sarwar, a local councillor and cash-and-carry magnate.

Watson's compensation for losing was a peerage, for which he took the name of his childhood home.

Now out of the Commons, he went to work for PS Communications in Edinburgh alongside Struan Stevenson, now a Tory MEP, and Dennis Robertson Sullivan, a senior Liberal Democrat. Although competent in the office, one colleague remembers Watson had "a short fuse", and could not bear to be thwarted.

With the advent of the Scottish Parliament, Watson seized the chance of becoming MSP for Glasgow Cathcart. Vain enough to expect a cabinet appointment as his due, he was passed over by Donald Dewar and did not become a minister until 2001, when Jack McConnell gave him tourism, culture, and sport.

However, his early years as an MSP were not uneventful. After introducing a bill banning hunting with dogs, he told his wife of 13 years he had started an affair with Clare Thomas, a recently married IT worker at Westminster, who at 25 was exactly half his age.

According to one friend, the Westminster and Holyrood activities came together when the pro-hunt lobby, who had been out to demonise Watson, discovered the affair and threatened to expose it. It was a "Robin Cook moment", in which he was forced to choose between his wife and mistress, said the friend.

The split cost Watson many of his allies in Labour circles. After his marriage foundered, so too did his career as a minister. After the 2003 elections, Watson was dumped on the backbenches after opposing local hospital closures and the ministerial career he had craved was in ruins. In February last year, he started out on his third marriage, but by the autumn he was in a curious, downbeat mood.

A friend met him drinking heavily late one night just a few weeks before the fire at Prestonfield.

Disappointed by Westminster, still sour over Govan, a ministerial flop, and with no political promotion ahead, Watson had cut a sad, slightly desperate figure. The friend wondered if all these disappointments might have later played a part at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards Ð much as Paul Burns, Watson's lawyer, hinted in court. Steeped in alcohol and becoming more bitter by the hour, did Watson light that curtain in one of his misfiring practical jokes?