Peter Watt

Peter Watt (aged 37 in November 2007 [1]) was the General Secretary of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom from January 2006 until he resigned in November 2007 as a result of the Donorgate affair.

From 1992 to 1996 Watt trained as a nurse. He worked for the Labour Party from 1996, first as a local organiser for Battersea and Wandsworth, then in Labour Party head office on election delivery and recruitment and then as Regional Director of the Eastern region. He returned to head office as Director of Finance and Compliance, a role that bridges legal and financial party issues and also usually includes a tacit role of enforcing party discipline and sorting out internal disputes. Viewed as loyal to the party leadership, he has on occasion come into conflict with the trade union movement over party policy and organisation, especially apparent at the Labour Party Conference in 2005.

Watt was also the source of controversy at the Irish Labour Party's 2006 Annual Conference in Dublin, where he was a guest speaker. A silent protest by a group of young activists protesting against the British Labour government's role in the war on Iraq disrupted his speech [2][3].

Watt was appointed as General Secretary by the Party's National Executive Committee on 7 November 2005. He was apparently not the candidate favoured by Tony Blair but won the NEC vote by some margin [4].

He is married and the father of three children as well as an active foster carer.

BBC News reported that he resigned as General Secretary on 26 November 2007 and he was quoted as saying that he knew about an arrangement by which one individual, David Abrahams, had made a number of donations to the Labour Party through third parties without the fact that he was ultimate donor being reported. He said that he had not appreciated that he had failed to comply with the reporting requirements.