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Tom Watson, the Labour deputy leader accused of leading a child abuse ‘witch hunt’, is related to a paedophile scoutmaster, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The politician’s uncle was last year jailed for indecently assaulting a nine-year-old Cub Scout five decades ago, in what was described as a ‘gross abuse of his position of trust’.

Watson is under fire for making ‘unfounded’ sex crime allegations about Lord Brittan during a campaign to expose an alleged VIP child abuse ring and Establishment cover-up.

But he has chosen never to speak of the crimes of his uncle, Peter Halliwell, who abused the boy ‘for his own gratification’.

Halliwell was sentenced to 27 months in jail after pleading guilty to three counts of indecent assault when he appeared at Manchester Crown Court in March 2014.

The offences related to the ‘targeted’ abuse of a boy when he was a Scout leader in Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, between 1965 and 1967.

Halliwell, 78, has since been released but remains on the sex offenders’ register.

‘Halliwell used his role as a Scout leader to target a young boy in his care,’ the Crown Prosecution Service said at the time of his conviction. ‘This was a gross abuse of his position of trust in the Scouts and in the local community, whereby he persistently exploited the boy for his own gratification.’

In a statement to The Mail on Sunday last night, Watson confirmed he knew about his uncle’s crime.

He said: ‘I barely know Peter Halliwell. His victim deserved justice and I’m glad he got it.’

The senior MP declined to say when he first heard about the abuse carried out by his uncle and whether it had affected his campaign on the subject. It is believed Watson has not seen his uncle for more than a decade.

The middle-aged golf writer was following Tom Watson. He had achieved, more or less simultaneously with Watson (and in spite of a long detour behind the gallery ropes), the perimeter of the 7th green of the Augusta National course, where tributaries of traffic from the 3rd and 8th tees created an almost total strangulation of movement. From where he stood, there were five rows of moist fans encroaching on his vantage point, affording a view of Watson in action roughly equivalent to following the progress of a pot roast through the minute pane in an oven door.

The golf writer said it was his 26th Masters, and although he'd never been crazy about golf as subject matter, he liked being able to participate in this way. He compared it with holding hands at a sèance while the central figure levitated overhead. Other writers, he said, covered the Masters from the clubhouse veranda, soaking up information from dispatches and chance interviews, like war correspondents, but he preferred walking the course. He said getting out to watch Watson had become an increasingly enjoyable experience. He said that Watson had become his favorite, though he would never admit it to the public. He said that one by one he had been dispelling, at least to his own satisfaction, the "misconceptions" about Watson.

"Misconceptions?" his companion asked.

"Charisma," the golf writer said. "For one, they say Watson has no charisma, as if it were something great golfers carry around in their bags, like a sand wedge. I've been around them for 30 years, and only a very few—Snead, Palmer, Trevino—have what could properly be defined as charisma. Hogan had about as much charisma as a bounds marker. Byron Nelson was dull copy—his words—until he won 11 tournaments in a row. Then he became Lord Byron and was discovered to be eminently quotable. Nobody accused Nicklaus of having charisma until he lost all that weight and let his hair grow. Up to then he was just a fat, brusque-talking, dea

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Things come back. “Star Trek” came back. George Foreman came back. Short skirts came back. John Travolta came back. Wrestling came back. Mark Spitz came back. “Batman” came back. John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom came back. War came back.

Or were they never gone?

Tom Watson never was.

Yet we waited and waited and waited for Watson to come back, as though he were Godot, as though he must. For 10 years and more, he was the god of golf. PGA player of the year six times. Leading money-maker on the tour five years. Winner of five British Opens and two Masters. He was Thomas Sturges Watson, the green monster.

And then he wasn’t.

One day he was the fresh prince of Pebble Beach, with the most stupendous beyond-the-fringe shot anybody attending a U.S. Open ever did see. Clock hands spin. Calendar pages fall. It is nine years later and Tom Watson has won exactly three more tournaments in his native land. One at LaCosta and another outside Chicago in 1984. Something in San Antonio in 1987. Nothing since. Not a one. Not a major, not a minor.

Byron Nelson took a gander at his young friend one afternoon a dozen years ago and said: “Tom’s the top star of this sport, period.”

And then he wasn’t.

The book of Watson’s life, like Ronald Reagan’s, might well be called: “Where’s the Rest of Me?” The former President’s autobiography was so named because, in one of his films, his character awoke in a hospital and found that doctors had amputated a leg. Tom Watson waved his right arm limply after another exasperating experience a few years back and said: “Sometimes, I wish I could cut this thing off. It won’t do what I say.”

Immediately he apologized for this remark’s bad taste, because Tom Watson generally is careful not to offend. But such was his unhealthy attitude at the moment. There was a similar soul-searching question in the title of a Broadway play, “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” in which a sculptor wishes not t