Without him, it could all so easily have fallen apart. There are vanishingly few politicians of any era of whom that’s true, but John Prescott was one of them. Though doomed to be remembered for that punch thrown on the campaign trail, it’s as an admittedly often belligerent keeper of the peace that history should really remember him: the man all sides trusted because he seemed so uncomplicatedly himself. If that sounds easy, think how many politicians have tried to project authenticity and failed. Among modern politicians only Nigel Farage comes close, and Prescott in his heyday would have eaten Farage for breakfast.
Beneath the gruffness he could be funny and kind – he once obligingly moved an interview so that I wasn’t late for my own hen night, though he was deputy prime minister at the time – but also oddly vulnerable. It took courage for a man who had always been sensitive to ridicule to confess, as he did on leaving office, to a long struggle with bulimia. But the eating disorder was perhaps his way of managing an anxiety familiar to so many working-class kids made good: the nagging fear that any minute now someone will realise you don’t belong and kick you out. He’d never forgotten the love letters once returned to him by a girl he had a crush on, complete with spelling mistakes corrected, nor the Tory MPs who knew he’d been a waiter on cruise ships and would shout “Mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni!” across the chamber.
His distrust of spin doctors, too, reflected years of dealing with arrogant young bucks who mistakenly assumed the old lion was getting toothless. Occasionally he would growl at Blair to “Tell your kids to get their scooters off my lawn.” But the smarter kids realised there was only one indispensable figure in Tony Blair’s project and it wasn’t Peter Mandelson, nor even perhaps Gordon Brown.
Prescott was the soul and conscience of the Labour movement, the man whose presence at the cabinet table persuaded millions to keep the faith, even when Blair sorely tested it. If Prezza could grudgingly bring himself to accept scrapping clause IV, they could. But to see him merely as a kind of human shield, deployed to protect his master from the left, is to underestimate a man who was both a shrewd judge of character and a sharp political operator.
It’s true that at first he struggled to master the vast, sprawling brief he had lobbied for as secretary of state for the environment, transport and the regions. (One of his colleagues once described finding Prescott at his desk in the small hours, head in hands, groaning: “There’s just so much paper.”) But the Kyoto climate summit revealed him to be a wily negotiator, who had learned from his years in the National Union of Seamen the art of pouncing and doing a deal when everyone was exhausted. Though his legendary battles with the English language sometimes ended in defeat – I can still remember the heart-sink of sitting down to transcribe an interview and struggling to extract a usable sentence from the impassioned jumble – you always knew exactly what he meant.
And no deputy leader since has been so adept at the near-impossible balancing act of being simultaneously unerringly loyal and fiercely independent-minded, defending the prime minister to the death in public but giving him both barrels in private. It was rare to catch even a whiff of unhappiness from the Prescott camp – though it happened, especially on education reform, a sensitive subject for the man who had left school at 15 with no qualifications. He didn’t win every battle, but policies often emerged sharper from the fight. Who, you wonder, plays that role for Starmer now?
Though it’s tempting to say that we will never see his like again, that’s true only in the narrowest of senses.
No minister caught using his official car for a journey all of 200 yards would get away today with blaming his wife for not wanting to get her hair blown about (though in fairness to Pauline Prescott’s hairdos, a triumph of contemporary engineering, that sounded plausible). He was arguably lucky not to have his two-year affair with Tracey Temple, who was his diary secretary and more than two decades his junior, judged by gen Z standards.
But he has an obvious heir in Angela Rayner, another working-class kid whose ebullience masks insecurity, with a similar gift for speaking from the heart that sometimes gets her in trouble, and who is only half joking when she calls herself “John Prescott in a skirt”.
As deputies, however, they differ in one respect. Prescott had never so much as dreamed of wanting to be leader, which made him the one person Blair could trust with anything – including, when the time came, a semi-peaceful transition to Gordon Brown. He was New Labour’s honest broker, even if he occasionally drove them all mad: the unseen glue that held an otherwise potentially unstable coalition – old and New Labour, unions and bosses, grassroots and government, heart and head – together. A gentle reminder, perhaps, to all who sail in the ship of state that sometimes an anchor is not a drag: that in a storm, sometimes it’s what keeps you safe.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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