by Tom Watson
And who still eats bacon and eggs for breakfast.
CHAPTER ONE
Tipping the Scales
We Watsons loved our food and, thanks to my mum (or ‘mom’ if you hail from the West Midlands), we certainly got our fair share of it. While the family coffers weren’t exactly overflowing – my parents both worked for the council, and didn’t earn a fortune – Mom budgeted very well and always ensured that her brood enjoyed plenty of good grub.
Our Sunday lunches were a weekly institution. While Mom got everything prepared at home, Dad would take me, my brother and my sister to a working men’s club, the Habberley, where he’d sink two or three pints with his mates as we drank Coke, munched Quavers and played on the fruit machines. We would make our way back home at about three o’clock, to be greeted with a meal of either steak and kidney pie served up with creamy mash and peas, or roast beef and Yorkshire puds swathed in home-made gravy.
Despite being stuffed to the gills – Mom’s portions were massive – we’d invariably make room for pudding. There would be a chorus of ‘mmmmmm’s as Mom, wearing oven mitts, brought in crowd-pleasing desserts like syrup sponge served with custard or, if the ice-cream van happened to come down our road that afternoon, dollops of Mr Whippy. Legend had it that Margaret Thatcher helped to invent that particular brand of ice cream when she was a chemist in the 1950s.
‘That woman stole your school milk, Tom, but she also gave you Mr Whippy,’ my dad would say.
My parents split up in the late seventies, sadly, but the Sunday lunches continued with my stepdad Barry at the table. Indeed, he loved Mom’s apple pie so much that he persuaded her to commercialise production.
‘D’you know what, Linda, people would pay good money for that pie,’ he’d often say, wiping the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘No one makes pastry like you.’
‘Thanks, Barry, love,’ she’d reply, beaming.
He wasn’t wrong. Soon Mom would be selling her sweet and savoury offerings to our local Berni Inn, based at the Riverboat restaurant on Blackwell Street. The place was the height of sophistication in 1980s Kidderminster, boasting a huge all-you-can-eat salad bar and housing one of the few Atari ‘Pong’ arcade games in the area.
Mom’s culinary repertoire became even more adventurous when she subscribed to Supercook magazine, and my brother, sister and I would return home from school to be greeted with the aroma of her freshly baked creations. Her showpiece Battenberg cake, with its pink ’n’ yellow chequerboard, blanketed in thick marzipan, looked almost too good to eat.
Unfortunately, there was no such food heaven at school. In the early 1980s, the Tory-run Herefordshire and Worcestershire County Council had sacked the dinner ladies at King Charles I Comprehensive and, in the name of progress, had decided to privatise the service. Almost overnight, canteen-cooked meals were dropped from our lunchtime menu, and were replaced with reheated fast food including hot dogs, hamburgers and doughnuts. Those pupils entitled to free school dinners (me included) were given yellow meal tokens worth 45p, which only stretched to a battered sausage and a handful of chips. Unimpressed, I’d often flog my token for 40p, sneak out of the school gates and scamper over to Captain Cod’s on Station Hill. There, I’d hand over my ill-gotten gains for a ‘Scholar’s Special’: a steaming parcel of sausage and chips (35p) plus a potato scallop (5p). Mrs Thatcher might well have been proud of my entrepreneurial spirit, but Mom was having none of it.
‘Tom, you’ll get into bother,’ she muttered one day after some local busybody had spied me queuing outside the chippy in my school uniform. ‘If they end up taking your tokens away, you’ll be using your pocket money instead.’
In spite of my hearty appetite, I was an averagely built teenager (playing lots of schoolboy rugby probably helped to keep me slim). I really started to pile on the weight in my early twenties, however, having become addicted to junk food and cheap beer while studying politics at Hull University. There, I’d found myself developing a fondness for beer and burgers, and a weakness for the city’s drinking dens and takeaways. A bellyful of Skol in the John McCarthy Bar was often followed by a chicken madras from the venerable Ray’s Place. I would frequently be accompanied by my housemate, Neil Codling, a great lad who, incidentally, would one day end up playing keyboards for Suede.
Fried breakfasts were the order of the day in our Young Ones-esque student digs, comprising platefuls of greasy eggs and gristly sausages, served up with baked beans, HP sauce and a stack of buttered white bread. My role as president of the Student Union wasn’t exactly conducive to a healthy lifestyle, either, since the events I helped to organise – gigs, ceilidhs and freshers’ festivities – were often very boozy affairs. As time progressed, and my penchant for anything fatty, fizzy or sweet persisted, I ballooned rapidly and was forced to upsize my baggy, beige Marks & Spencer cardigans to Large. And then to Extra Large.
It was around that time that I received a stern talking-to from the university’s GP. I had visited her surgery for some flu medication, and while I’d been there she’d decided to measure my height and weight.
‘You’re fifteen and a half stone,’ she’d said, grimacing as I’d stepped onto the scales. ‘You do realise that’s in the obese BMI range, don’t you?’
I confessed that I’d never heard of this ‘BMI’, or body mass index, which prompted the GP to explain its implications and question my fitness and nutrition.
‘Putting it simply, Tom, you need to eat less, drink less and move more,’ said the doc.
No one had ever upbraided me about my weight before – maybe they’d not seen it as their place to do so – yet I felt suitably admonished and embarrassed enough to take action. First and foremost, I enrolled at the campus sports centre, signing up for some circuit training sessions and occasionally using the cycling and rowing machines. Then I had a stab at moderating my food intake, albeit rather half-heartedly. For two or three months I only ate fried breakfasts at weekends, and I replaced my carry-out curries with microwaved ‘healthy options’ (although the portions of the latter were so tiny I often ate two). While I wasn’t prepared to give up alcohol – Dr Killjoy wasn’t going to deny me that – I compromised by substituting my pints of lager with halves.
Despite all this, my weight remained static, and I couldn’t say that I felt any healthier. Resigned to the fact that I was innately hefty – and assuming I was naturally ‘big-boned’ – I quit the gym, binned my diet and resumed my old habits. Sod that for a lark, I thought.
‘Steady on, Tom, no one’s going to take it off you,’ I remember my housemate Simon Shott saying as I wolfed down a Friday night doner kebab, sluicing it down with a ‘full-fat’ Coke.
‘You know what, I could eat another one of those,’ I’d said, smiling, as I polished off every morsel of my meat ’n’ carb fix, convincing myself that I simply needed more fuel than my slimmer, sprightlier friends.
As it transpired, I quit university earlier than planned to take up a role with my beloved Labour Party as a youth development officer. Left-wing politics had run through my family like letters in a stick of rock and, for me, the lure of a job at the Walworth Road HQ had been impossible to resist. My parents were long-time party members and activists – Dad had served as a local councillor in our home town of Kidderminster – and our kitchen was always alive with debate and discussion regarding the issues of the day. Whether it was the Watergate scandal in the United States, or Margaret Thatcher coming to power in the United Kingdom, the Watson clan (including my younger brother Dan and my little sister Meg) were well-informed on the issues of the day.
Around the time of the Three-Day Week – and during one of the many power cuts we experienced during the electricity shortages – I vividly remember lying on my top bunk, eating a banana sandwich in the dark.
‘Why do the lights keep going off, Dan, and why is Mom walking around with a candle?’ I asked my brother, who always kipped beneath me on the bottom bunk.
‘She says
it’s because that horrid Mr Heath won’t pay the miners enough money,’ came his reply.
I was an activist from an early age. I remember when I was seven years old, during the 1974 general election, helping out my parents by delivering Labour Party leaflets through letter boxes, collecting polling numbers at the nearby Franche Primary School and pasting electoral registers onto display boards with Copydex. I became completely enthralled by the procedures and mechanics of the voting system, whether it was the Get Out the Vote (a.k.a. ‘GOTV’) battles between local volunteers, or the excitement of the final count in the town hall. I loved observing the candidates as they nervously watched ballot papers being sorted into piles, always crossing my fingers for the person sporting the big red rosette.
As it happened, the youth development job was my second role at Walworth Road. I had actually secured my first position with the Party in my late teens, having just left sixth form. Fancying a taste of London life – I’d become a tad bored with life in provincial Kidderminster – I’d applied for a £5,400-a-year trainee library assistant post, and had been thrilled to get the job. Being a computer nerd worked in my favour, I think. Although I’d spent many an hour playing Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum, I’d taught myself some elementary coding, too. This fitted in with the library’s plans to invest in a computerised database for lendings, returns and renewals (‘It’s the future, Tom,’ I was told at the time).
My remit also included collating press clippings from the daily selection of tabloids and broadsheets, and typing up documents for various MPs, councillors and activists. On my very first day, in the winter of 1984, I found myself sharing a lift with party leader Neil Kinnock and his deputy Roy Hattersley, but was far too star-struck and tongue-tied to utter a single ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning’. Further down the line I’d receive a handwritten letter from the great Tony Benn (whom my dad hero-worshipped) thanking me sincerely for assisting him with the cuttings service. I treasured it for years.
Not long after my start date, I was taken out for lunch by a senior member of staff, Ted Higgins. He took me to the nearby Tankard pub in Walworth Road to sample their legendary 40p sausage baguette and, being on the executive committee of the Campaign for Real Ale, he introduced me to Bass beer. I fell asleep at my desk that afternoon – not the last time that would happen to me in my working life – but I made amends the next day, joining in with the staff aerobics session that regularly took place in the top-floor boardroom.
Walworth Road was abuzz with activity in those days. In 1985, singer Billy Bragg had launched the Red Wedge musicians’ collective to attract younger voters to the Labour Party, and I was asked to support the promotions team, who were organising a variety of concerts and events featuring artists like the Communards, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Style Council and Madness. For me, this was both a pleasure and a privilege – I was an NME- reading indie-music aficionado – and, in January 1986, I remember being in my element as I watched Billy, Paul Weller and an avant-garde duo called Frank Chickens performing at the Birmingham Odeon. That evening’s compère (who also happened to work in the Red Wedge office) was the inimitable ‘Porky the Poet’, also known as comedian Phill Jupitus. We often chatted about music at Labour Party HQ – he knew loads of up-and-coming bands – and I remember him handing me a shiny new Housemartins badge as we chinwagged by the photo-copier.
I bid farewell to Walworth Road after the 1987 general election to take up a job with the Save the Children charity, before embarking upon a short-lived stint as an advertising agency account executive. Hull University subsequently intervened, and then – four years after my librarian role, and carrying three extra stone (19 kilos) – I found myself back at Labour HQ.
‘Wow, Tom, you’ve put on some timber,’ commented a party activist who’d known me back in the day. ‘What happened, eh? Did you overdose on fish and chips up north?’
As I smiled through gritted teeth, I remember thinking Oh, do fuck off, you cheeky bastard…
I graduated from youth development officer to deputy general election coordinator (my seven-year-old self would have been so impressed), working under legendary campaigns manager and bon viveur Fraser Kemp. Then, operating from the new Labour Party headquarters in Millbank, I became part of the well-oiled machine that helped to propel Tony Blair into 10 Downing Street on 1 May 1997.
However, when the dust settled, and when promises of a more influential post-election role failed to materialise, I decided to apply for the position of national political officer with the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU). Based in the Kent town of Hayes, it was a hands-on campaigning role that included a great deal of weekend work and late-night meetings. The camaraderie and comradeship was second to none, though. One of my closest colleagues was the incomparable Bill Tynan, a regional officer in their Glasgow office who, shortly after I’d joined the union, had taken great pleasure in introducing me to a 250-strong convention of electricians and engineers in his native city.
‘This is Tom Watson,’ he’d announced on stage, throwing me a sideways glance. ‘He’s from our head office in London, England. He used to work for Tony Blair, at Labour HQ, in Millbank, London. Today he’s come up to Glasgow, Scotland to tell us how to do our politics. Over to you, Tom…’
Cheers for that, Bill, I thought, as boos and jeers (good-natured, I hoped) floated across the auditorium.
I survived the meeting – just – and afterwards Bill and his fellow activists, Gerry Leonard and Allan Cameron, whisked me over to a city-centre pub to sample some local hospitality. There was a significant drinks culture in union circles – they worked hard, and definitely played hard – and it was only after downing pints of beer for eight hours solid that I was allowed to stagger back to my city-centre hotel.
Back at our Hayes HQ I met a no-nonsense Yorkshirewoman called Siobhan, who was based in the estates department. I had actually first met her at a somewhat bizarre work night out – she’d beaten me in an arm-wrestling contest at an Elvis impersonators’ restaurant in Streatham – and we’d immediately hit it off. I recall inviting Siobhan over to my Bromley flat for our first evening meal together, and spending the afternoon cleaning my kitchen from top to bottom; I don’t think she’d have been impressed by the columns of empty Stella Artois cans, or the leaning tower of Domino’s pizza boxes.
We were soon engaged to be married, and began to make plans for a July 2000 wedding in a Kidderminster church. I got myself measured up for a smart two-piece suit – it was so expensive I had to borrow the money for it – and Siobhan found herself a nice bridal gown. Throughout the spring, however, I had so many lads’ nights out (including a five-day stag do in Barcelona) that I had a shock when I rocked up for the final suit fitting. All my partying had taken its toll and, as I surveyed my reflection in the mirror, all I saw was my gut hanging over the waistband and my chest bursting out of the shirt.
‘The wedding’s only a month away,’ I groaned. ‘There’s no way I can turn up looking like this.’
I arrived at work the next day in full-on panic mode, asking my colleagues if they had any emergency weight-loss advice. Coming to my rescue was my PA, Cathy Pearce, who delved into her desk drawer and handed me a photocopy of the cabbage soup diet.
‘If it’s a quick fix you want, Tom, this’ll do the trick,’ she whispered, folding it over as if it were subject to the Official Secrets Act. ‘I won’t lie, it tastes horrible and it’s a little, erm, unsociable, but some of the staff have sworn by it.’
‘You’re a star, Cathy,’ I replied, before heading off to the local Asda to plunder their stocks of savoy cabbage and vegetable Oxo cubes.
My workmate wasn’t wrong. While I rapidly lost weight on this bland, boring diet – I whittled myself down to 17 stone (108 kilos) – it proved to be insufferable not only for yours truly, but also for those friends, family and colleagues who had the misfortune to share confined spaces with me. Let’s be honest: I reeked from both
ends. At home I went through about twenty canisters of Air Wick, and at work Cathy would casually leave packets of mints on my desk to nullify my cabbage-scented belches.
All this effort had the desired effect, though – thank God – since I just about managed to squeeze into my posh suit on the Big Day. Unsurprisingly, by the end of our honeymoon in Bali I’d regained much of the weight I’d shed. After weeks of fasting on watery soup, I was desperate to eat some proper food.
‘I never want to see another cabbage again,’ I said to Siobhan as I tackled a huge plateful of pad thai.
Physically, my wife and I were like chalk and cheese, so much so that some friends playfully dubbed us ‘Laurel and Hardy’. Siobhan was a slender, sporty fitness fanatic who had plans to train as a boxing instructor, while I was a lardy, lethargic couch potato who got breathless walking to the corner shop. And, as time went on, my eating habits began to spiral out of control. A prime example of this occurred during a weekend visit to some friends in Oxford. On the Saturday evening they rustled up a delicious beef casserole, followed by a dessert of home-made Bakewell tart and custard, which they knew was a particular favourite of mine. After coffee and mints, we spent a pleasant few hours chatting, drinking and listening to music, but when they finally went upstairs to bed – and with my stomach rumbling non-stop – I felt compelled to make a detour. I crept into my friends’ kitchen, quietly opened their fridge and ogled the left-over Bakewell tart.
I’ll just have a tiny sliver for supper, I thought, as I grabbed a jammy wedge and dipped it in the jug of cold custard. One’s not going to hurt, is it?
Before I knew it, however, I found myself polishing off the remaining three slices too, leaving behind just a smattering of pastry crumbs. Any sense of dignity, propriety and restraint vanished as I succumbed to an intense and irrepressible urge to sate my hunger. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t even taste it. I just had to have it.
