‘Bonkers Brown’: Watt rekindles depression talk

Stand by for a new wave of conjecture about whether Gordon Brown is a "narcissistic manic depressive" or just plain "bonkers". With last week's abortive coup out of the way, the Mail on Sunday pounced yesterday while the PM was still at a low ebb with its serialisation of a damning book by the Labour party's former general-secretary, Peter Watt.

In it, he claims Brown quickly reduced Number Ten to a shambles when he took over from Tony Blair and that many of his Cabinet colleagues laugh at him behind his back.

The revelations in the book - Inside Out: My Story of Betrayal and Cowardice at the Heart of New Labour - come on the eve of Brown's pre-election pep-talk to Labour backbenchers, when he will seek to steady the leaking ship by saying of the Tories: "We can beat them, we must beat them, and we will beat them."

Brown will be flanked at today's meeting by this three election lieutenants, Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman and Douglas Alexander. Quite how the last of the trio is going to conduct himself will be interesting, for he plays a central role in one of the best anecdotes in the Watt book  - a particularly devastating memoir because the episodes described are so recent and because almost the players remain in place.

Alexander, the international aid minister, is quoted as saying that one good reason for Brown to go for a snap election in the autumn of 2007 - the election he famously bottled - was that "We have spent ten years working with this guy and we don't actually like him. We have always thought the longer the British public had to get to know him, the less they would like him as well."

Watt claims that the sentiment was repeated to him many times by other senior Labour figures.

As for the supposedly shambolic takeover at Downing Street, Watt writes: "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... Gordon was simply making it up as he went along."

To illustrate the taciturn PM on his worst behaviour, Watt describes a dinner at Number Ten for US Democrats where the guests sat down without Brown's permission. The PM was apparently monosyllabic for the rest of the meal as he sulked at the Americans' presumably unintended slight. When the plates were cleared, he quite suddenly got up and left. "He's bonkers," Watt's wife Vilma whispered.

One of the first to hit the blogosphere yesterday about the Watt revelations - and pick up on that "bonkers" remark - was political blogger Guido Fawkes.

And what's riveting about Guido's take on it is that he has chosen to tell an anecdote that finally supports the theory blogger John Ward put forward in September last year - picked by the Mole - that Gordon Brown was taking powerful drugs to control depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Fawkes, responding to Mrs Watt's "bonkers" comment, wrote that he had raised the matter of whether the PM might indeed be bonkers with a former senior Downing Street adviser. Over lunch, this person had gone into "a long soliloquy about the different Freudian personality types... He concluded, in a matter-of-fact way, that Brown was a narcissistic manic depressive."

John Ward, who had to take a certain amount of flak when he first came up with his well-reasoned theory about Brown being on anti-depressants, was delighted to have his thesis corroborated. (Readers with long memories will recall that Ward's argument was based on the revelation by a senior civil servant that Brown had been forbidden various foods - all of which were on the banned list for patients taking MAOI anti-depressants.)

Where will this go?

Guido Fawkes concluded his post yesterday ominously: "There is lots more of this to come out about Brown..."

While John Ward ended his blog at notbornyesterday.org with this teaser: "There is a certain well-placed lady who just might - after many sleepless nights and much persuasion - go public at last, and sink the multiply-torpedoed 'leader' that is Gordon Brown today."

We shall see. In the meantime, the Mole has a question. Why, if Peter Watt was so supportive of the Hewitt-Hoon coup attempt - he commended their "bravery" to the Mail on Sunday - did he and the plotters not coordinate their attack?

If the first episode of Watt's book - devastating enough that it hardly needs a second instalment - had come out the weekend before Hewitt and Hoon, rather than the weekend after, might not David 'the bottler' Miliband have felt emboldened to jump? Just a thought.

'Inside Out: My Story of Betrayal and Cowardice at the heart of New Labour' by Peter Watt is published on January 25 by Biteback. ·