‘Shambles’ Brown remains under siege

GORDON Brown’s premiership was under siege again yesterday as a former general secretary of the Labour Party stepped forward to complain that Number 10 had been reduced to a “shambles”.

Peter Watt backed calls for the prime minister to be replaced, saying he lacked “emotional intelligence” and was disliked by even some of his closest Cabinet allies.

His intervention follows a tumultuous week for the Labour Party in which Mr Brown survived another attempt to force him out.

Watt, who was resigned over the proxy donations scandal in 2007, praised the actions on Wednesday of former Cabinet ministers Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon.

And, in memoirs serialised by The Mail on Sunday yesterday, he painted a highly critical portrait of Downing Street during the first months of Brown’s premiership.

“Downing Street was a shambles,” he wrote. “There was no vision, no strategy, no co-ordination. It was completely dysfunctional.

“Gordon had been so desperate to become prime minister that we all assumed he knew what he was going to do when he got there.

“I imagined there was some grand plan, tucked away in a drawer. But if any such document existed, nobody seemed to know about it. Gordon was simply making it up as he went along.”

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Watt said Hoon and Hewitt had been “brave” to issue their call for a secret ballot on the leadership. He said that a leader as unpopular as Brown could not win the forthcoming general election and urged the party to take action “fast”.

“Gordon is a big political figure but he lacks the emotional intelligence required by a modern leader,” Watt said.

“If you cannot connect with people, you will fail. Leaders like Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were fantastic communicators. Gordon just doesn’t have those skills.”