As a journalist on John Prescott’s local paper, the Hull Daily Mail, in the 1970s and early 80s, I found he was one of the few local politicians who took the trouble to understand how the media worked – our deadlines, for example.
Some of them would phone up at any time and dictate a prepared statement as if they expected it to go in the paper verbatim, while John had better timing and was always ready to be questioned and respond.
But he did not always get it right. In 1974 he tried to set up a photo-op with supermarket baskets to show how much less you could buy for your money under the Ted Heath government, but he left it too late, overlooking the fact that the media did not run political campaigning stories on polling day itself. That irked him.
He kept close to his political back garden, perhaps aware that he was something of an incomer who had beaten two or three established local Labour figures to be the candidate for East Hull. He did this while also tackling national and international issues such as the Cod War.
After I had moved on from Humberside our careers occasionally reconnected and he would share bits of the latest news about Hull, always a great example of an MP who represented broader interests than his own.
