Labour MPs who suffered polling day humiliation must be delighted at the prospect of Tom Watson becoming their party’s new deputy leader. Apparently he wants to turn the Labour Party into the “finest campaigning organisation in Britain”:

@mrstth Basically I love the Labour party and want it to be the finest campaigning organisation in Britain. That's the deputy job.

— tom_watson (@tom_watson) May 11, 2015

So what’s his track record there? The man who cocked up the 2012  Bradford West by-election spent this election campaign rounding up hundreds of Labour activists and herding them to Sheffield Hallam. Watson’s vanity “mission to kick Nick Clegg out of parliament“, as he briefed the Birmingham Mail, even saw him try and fail to get Owen Jones to stand. This post on his Facebook page reveals Watson’s responsibility for diverting valuable resources away from marginal seats, which Labour went on to lose:

“Though [Labour’s Sheffield Hallam candidate] is not on the official key seat list, he is top of mine.”

Those resources diverted by Watson would have been much better spent in marginals like, say, Morley and Outwood…