‘These tactics were the worst I’d ever seen’

Elwyn Watkins addresses the crowd outside the court

Elwyn Watkins says he has a brilliant legal team — and the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud — to thank for his history-making legal victory.

He has spent the weekend being interviewed, filmed by TV and recorded by radio following his successful election petition which stripped Labour MP Phil Woolas of the seat he held for 13 years.

The Liberal Democrat is today the first candidate to be officially named to fight the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election whenever it is held after he was the unanimous choice at a selection meeting in Delph on Saturday night.

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Mr Watkins, born in Rochdale, had been a local councillor for six years but was a Parliamentary political novice when he challenged the experienced former Labour immigration minister over what he said were lies about him in Mr Woolas’s election leaflets.

The Chronicle broke the story exclusively in May when Mr Watkins revealed he had launched his Election Petition in the High Court.

And he said he would have been ruined if he had lost but added: “I would rather fight and lose it, than walk away always wishing I had done something about this. It has cost me a considerable sum of money, but it was a principled stand.”

Mr Woolas has now been ordered to pay all his costs.

Mr Watkins said his first stroke of luck was being picked to fight the Oldham East and Saddleworth seat three years ago, his first parliamentary campaign.

After his defeat in May by just 103 votes, lawyers told him he had a mountain to climb to bring his case, based on an obscure section of electoral law not tested since 1911.

He chatted to an old friend and leading fraud lawyer Alaister Webster QC who fought the Rochdale seat for the Liberal Democrats when Mr Watkins was a teenager, who told him if he was prepared to fight it was worthwhile.

Then he was lucky to have chosen a brilliant legal team, he added. Ironically his lawyers picked Helen Mountfield QC, who had been a pupil of Cherie Blair, Tony Blair’s wife, to lead his case, and James Laddie, who was a barrister in Mrs Blair’s Matrix chambers, to assist her at the Election Court.

Luck had played another part when Steven Green, a Labour campaigns adviser for Mr Woolas, was trapped in Spain because of the Icelandic ash cloud just before the election, he said, and had to keep in touch by computer, not by phone. The Labour team’s computers were seized as evidence for the case.

Mr Watkins said: “There was a clear email trail between him and the Labour team in Oldham. Everything happened in the last few days before the election. They were very indiscreet about what they put in their emails.”

That included a damning exchange between Mr Green and Mr Woolas’s agent Joe Fitzpatrick, worried about strong Asian support for Mr Watkins. Mr Fitzpatrick said: “If we can convince them (voters) that they are being used by Muslims it may save him (Mr Woolas) and the more we can damage Elwyn the easier it will be.”

Mr Green agreed saying Labour needed to “galvanise the white Sun-reading voters.”

Mr Watkins said he knew the Oldham East and Saddleworth seat had a reputation for bitter fights and said: “I was not the first person this had happened to and would not have been the last had I not been successful. These tactics were some of the worst things I have ever seen.

“All political commentators are saying this is a historic landmark decision but I think we are only starting on a long and difficult road to clean up politics.

“All politicians will have to look at what they do with leaflets and what they say to people on doorsteps. People want clean politics.”

He was also lucky, he said, that he had David Hampson as the local Lib-Dem party treasurer and Phil Renold as his agent, when he was accused by Labour of paying his campaign staff less than the minimum wage.

A Labour supporter, Rebecca McGladdery reported him to HM Revenue and Customs for paying less than the minimum wage, but an investigation found they were working as volunteers not employees and didn’t take it further.