In an age of increasingly bland, stage-managed politicians, John Prescott, who has died aged 86, cut an unrepentantly colourful figure.
As Tony Blair’s Deputy Prime Minister for ten years, he had little impact on day-to-day policy. Indeed, most of his supposedly landmark initiatives, such as a joined-up public transport system and devolved governments for England’s regions, were total failures.
To the public, however, Prescott was one of the Blair administration’s most recognisable faces. At a time when most politicians seemed terrified of saying anything vaguely memorable, here was an unashamed bruiser who gloried in his working-class roots, mangled his sentences and, infamously, exchanged punches with an egg-throwing protester in full view of the cameras.
Asked how he would like to be remembered, Prescott once replied: ‘As an aggressive bugger.’ He was certainly that.
Yet at a time when many Labour ministers, then and now, seemed to have stepped straight from the Oxbridge seminar room into a ministerial car, Prescott’s remarkable life story struck a powerful chord. And despite all the verbal missteps, sex scandals and corruption allegations, he never lost his image of working-class authenticity, which helped to protect him when other politicians might have fallen.
Although he was usually painted as a stereotypical Northerner, Prescott was actually born in Prestatyn, Wales, on May 31, 1938. His father was a railway signalman and local Labour councillor, and he came from a long line of miners.
When young John was four, the family moved to a village just outside Rotherham, where he went to primary school. He was far from an academic high-flyer, and failed the 11-plus exam to get into grammar school – a disappointment that rankled with the immensely thin-skinned Prescott for the rest of his life.
His home life was not happy. As a boy, he later told an interviewer: ‘I saw my dad kiss another woman and ran to the police station and asked them to arrest him. They put me in the car and said: “Go home son, don’t tell your mum.” It left me with a horrible feeling. My parents divorcing is my greatest regret.’
John Prescott in 1974. In an age of increasingly bland, stage-managed politicians, he cut an unrepentantly colourful figure, writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK
At the Labour Party Conference in 1992, the year he lost a bid for the deputy leadership to Margaret Beckett
When the middle-class, privately-educated Tony Blair took over in 1994 – with Gordon Brown as shadow chancellor – Prescott was the obvious candidate to become his deputy
After secondary modern school, he joined the merchant navy, where he became a steward on the great ocean liners. It was in this capacity that he had his first brush with prime ministerial glamour.
At the beginning of 1957, Prescott was working on the Cunard liner on which Sir Anthony Eden, who had just resigned after the Suez Crisis, was sailing to New Zealand. Prescott was then a keen amateur boxer, showing skills that were to resurface on the electoral campaign trail almost half a century later.
For Eden’s benefit, the staff put on a boxing tournament. Prescott won, and the former prime minister duly presented him with his prize, a bottle of beer. Indeed, the story goes that Prescott won so many bouts that Eden decided to give him the rest of the bottles in private, so as not to alienate the other stewards.
Perhaps the story is a bit exaggerated, but it captures the essence of the man. For although Prescott was much more sensitive and self-doubting than many people realised, he always saw himself as a fighter, hauling himself up by his own efforts.
In 1961, having already taken his first steps as a union official, he married Pauline Tilston. Then he went to Ruskin College, Oxford, a favourite educational destination for late-blooming union men, to gain a diploma in history and politics.
After returning to work in the National Union of Seamen, which was then firmly on the Left, he became a Labour MP in 1970, defeating the future Conservative Chancellor Norman Lamont in Hull East.
For the first ten years or so, Prescott was an unremarkable party man, a solid stalwart on the Labour centre-Left. But the party was changing. As working-class MPs retired, their replacements tended to be much better-educated and more middle-class, burning with evangelical fervour.
In this context, Prescott’s proletarian credentials became ever more valuable. By 1988, when he made a token effort to challenge Roy Hattersley for the Labour deputy leadership, he was regarded as one of the chief standard-bearers of the ‘Old Labour’ cause, a man steeped in the beer-and-sandwiches world of the working men’s club.
Prescott with then-Prince Charles in 1998
Nelson Mandela greets John Prescott in 2000
Prescott never pretended to be an unalloyed admirer of New Labour’s shiny new ethos
By the early 1990s, Prescott’s working-class background had become his trump card. He lost another bid for the deputy leadership in 1992 to Margaret Beckett, but won credit with the increasingly powerful party moderates by vigorously supporting John Smith’s efforts to end the trade union block vote.
This was a sign of Prescott’s underlying pragmatism. Although, in common with many on the Labour Left today, he made no secret of his visceral personal hatred for the Conservatives, he was very far from being an ideological zealot. He was a tribal politician, not an ideas man.
So when Smith died in 1994 and the middle-class, privately-educated Tony Blair took over, Prescott was the obvious candidate to become his deputy. In effect, he became Blair’s proletarian counterweight, a last relic of Old Labour, wheeled out whenever the leadership needed to placate its older, poorer Northern voters.
Prescott himself never pretended to be an unalloyed admirer of New Labour’s shiny new ethos. In private, he bitterly complained that although he had been elected deputy leader by a comfortable margin, he was consistently shut out of the key decisions.
The main culprit, he thought, was Blair’s chief spin doctor, the super-smooth Peter Mandelson. So when, during a bizarre photo opportunity, Prescott was presented with a crab in a jar, he took great delight in nicknaming him ‘Peter’.
‘Do you think you’ll get on the executive, Peter?’ he asked mockingly. The crab maintained a dignified silence.
By this stage, Prescott himself was becoming a target for unrelenting mockery. In an era of slick, stage-managed politics, his rough-hewn inarticulacy seemed not so much old-fashioned as positively antediluvian.
At the sight of his name on a list of speakers, political sketch-writers could barely contain their glee. As the Times’s Matthew Parris – whom Prescott deeply resented – once put it, Labour’s deputy leader ‘went twelve rounds with the English language and left it slumped and bleeding over the ropes’.
With Cherie and Tony Blair and wife Pauline at the Labour Party conference in 1996
A day at the races with Pauline in 1997
Transcribed on the page, Prescott’s Commons outbursts often looked utterly incomprehensible, as if he had simply thrown together words at random rather than bothering to construct a meaningful sentence.
‘And even in the gas and electricity he talks about Government and Treasury particularly have always imposed a kind of energy tax on them,’ he once told the House, ‘forced them to charge more through the external financial limits the negative role he talks about which is a tax on those industries.’
And on the campaign trail in 2005, he came out with this extraordinary stream of consciousness.
‘Look I’ve got my old pledge card a bit battered and crumpled, we said we’d provide more turches churches teachers and we have,’ he began. ‘I think Mr Kennedy well we all congratulate on his baby and the Tories are you remembering what I’m remembering boom and bust negative equity, remember Mr Howard, I mean are you thinking what I’m thinking I’m remembering, it’s all a bit wonky isn’t it?’
Wonky was indeed the word. But Prescott hated being a figure of fun, and always insisted that he was the victim of snobbery by wicked middle-class Tories, whose advantages he had never shared.
The problem, though, was that his record in office made it impossible to take him seriously. When New Labour came to power in 1997 he was initially given his own super-ministry (‘Environment, Transport and the Regions’), but this proved something of a shambles.
His efforts to create an integrated public transport system came to nothing, while his great regional devolution drive was an utter fiasco. His first proposed regional assembly was earmarked for the North-East. Yet when the residents were invited to approve it in a referendum in 2004, no fewer than 78 per cent turned it down.
By now Prescott was becoming a national joke. When he attended the Brit Awards in 1998, the anarchist group Chumbawumba threw a jug of water over him. He did not take it well, telling the press that his chief assailant, one Danbert Nobacon (born Nigel Hunter), had terrified his ‘wife and other womenfolk’.
While Blair was away and Prescott was supposed to be standing in, photographers captured him playing croquet with his officials on the Dorneywood lawn
In April 2006 came the moment that marked the end, when it was revealed that Prescott had conducted a two-year affair with his secretary, Tracey Temple
Prescott was then a keen amateur boxer
A year later, Prescott was widely mocked when he insisted on being driven 250 yards from his hotel to the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth. Walking, he told reporters, was out of the question. ‘My wife doesn’t like to have her hair blown about. Have you got another silly question?’
The press called him ‘Two Jags’, a reference to the fact that he had two Jaguars, one private, the other a government car. But in 2001 he acquired a new nickname: ‘Two Jabs’.
The occasion was a walkabout in Rhyl during that year’s election campaign. Enraged by Labour’s inept handling of agriculture, a local farmer, Craig Evans, threw an egg from short range at Prescott’s head.
At that, the Deputy Prime Minister turned and punched Evans in the face, before being dragged into a brief brawl. For any other politician it would have been a career-ending disaster.
But where Prescott was concerned, the usual rules did not apply. ‘John is John,’ sighed Tony Blair, and he was duly forgiven.
After the ‘Rumble in Rhyl’, however, Prescott became the political equivalent of a music-hall turn. Although he remained as Blair’s deputy, nobody seriously imagined that he played a meaningful role in devising the government’s policy strategy.
Then, in April 2006, came the moment that marked the end, when it was revealed that Prescott had conducted a two-year affair with his secretary, Tracey Temple, complete with lurid stories of steamy clinches in the lift, encounters beneath a portrait of Oliver Cromwell and trysts at his grace-and-favour country house, Dorneywood.
His wife forgave him, but worse was to follow. Westminster insiders queued up to tell the press about his history of inappropriate remarks, groping and canoodling.
The occasion was a walkabout in Rhyl during the 2001 election campaign. Enraged by Labour’s inept handling of agriculture, a local farmer, Craig Evans, threw an egg from short range at Prescott’s head. At that, the Deputy Prime Minister turned and punched Evans in the face, before being dragged into a brief brawl
After stepping down at the 2010 election, he was elevated to the Lords
Only a month later, while Blair was away and Prescott was supposed to be standing in, photographers captured him playing croquet with his officials on the Dorneywood lawn. It was the final straw. His fellow Labour MPs were furious, and a chastened Prescott was forced to give up the use of his country house.
A year later, when Blair resigned as Prime Minister, Prescott announced his own retirement. After stepping down at the 2010 election, he was elevated to the Lords.
But he never changed. For the rest of his life he remained the same pugilistic brawler, hurling Twitter abuse at Tories and Labour moderates alike, complete with the usual quotient of spelling mistakes, malapropisms and grammatical howlers.
To his detractors, who included some of his own Labour colleagues, he was a graceless, charmless oaf, a venal, tribal bruiser with unreconstructed prejudices and unforgivably wandering hands.
But to his admirers, who included some of his Conservative opponents, he was the last of a dying breed, an old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth Labour man, who knew what it was like to do a proper day’s work and to haul himself up by his bootstraps.
Both verdicts have a grain of truth. He was a flawed man, certainly; yet for all his flaws, there was something remarkable about his personal journey, not least because it was such a contrast with the privileged backgrounds of so many politicians.
His current successor as Deputy Prime Minister, fellow ex-union firebrand Angela Rayner, may have described herself as ‘John Prescott in a skirt’. Yet many slick Labour ministers, in both the current administration and the one in which he served, lack one vital commodity he had in spades: authenticity.
Even the fact that he hated talking about class (and even claimed to be middle-class) seemed a genuine part of the picture, reflecting the enduring insecurities of a man who had risen from nothing.
In an age obsessed with modernity, he never made any pretence of moving with the times. ‘The thing I most dislike about the modern world,’ he once told an interviewer, ‘is I’m not part of it.’
And nobody better captured his own role in history. ‘When I do die, after 50 years in politics,’ Prescott remarked, ‘all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales.’
He was, of course, quite right.
