Labour spent £1.2 million on the election that never was

Unsurprisingly, expenses stories dominate the Sunday papers. But an interview with Peter Watt, the Labour Secretary General during the Blair-Brown handover who had to resign over the Abrahams affair, caught my eye. Watt’s main point is that he was left hanging in the wind by Brown but his comment about the election that never was strikes me as important:

“No matter what anyone says, the election had been called and was then cancelled. We had been working on it for weeks. We spent £1.2m in immediate preparations”

Watt also reinforcs the frequent criticisms of how Brown does politics: “Publicly, Gordon talks about values and his moral compass, but actually the way he conducts himself behind the scenes is anything but that – it’s brutal”.