The career path of John Prescott, from steward on ocean-going liners to Britain’s longest serving deputy prime minister – for 10 years from 1997 – was a triumph of determination and doggedness. Prescott, who has died aged 86, was the son of working-class parents, left school at 15 and ended up with a life peerage.
During 40 years as an MP for Kingston upon Hull East he saw himself as an embodiment of blunt and enduring Labour values. The leaders he loyally served – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – capitalised on his roots by contrast to their middle-class backgrounds.
Prescott could persuade the party to vote for measures to abolish ancient shibboleths, such as clause IV, Labour’s rule on public ownership of key industries, because of his background. His chief service in government may well have come as a conciliator between Blair and Brown, rather than his work as a departmental minister, even though he had some achievements in the latter, not least negotiating the Kyoto climate change agreement.
But Prescott’s achievements were often undermined by a grumpiness that did not always win admirers. “Why is it I’m the longest ever serving deputy prime minister, been here 40 years, and I don’t rate a photograph or picture in the House of Commons galleries of everybody? I don’t know. I don’t bother pondering about it. I just note that it happens,” he told a Guardian interviewer in 2008.
He complained that his face did not naturally fall into a smile and, while privately warm even towards political opponents, his relationship with the media was combative to say the least. The press ruthlessly mocked him, partly because they knew it would wind him up and he, ever sensitive to slights, unfailingly would be.
His inferiority complex clearly stemmed from his background and relative lack of education – though he made up for that later as an adult – and he once admitted that it caused him to fear being rejected and put down.
Prescott did suffer the miseries of chronic illnesses: bulimia, from which he suffered in silence for 20 years, and type 2 diabetes, diagnosed in 1990, which he also kept quiet about. But they did not stop him reaching the heights of his party and the government.
Born in Prestatyn, north Wales, John was the eldest of five children of Bert Prescott, a railway signalman and Labour activist who would lose part of his leg when he was wounded at Dunkirk two years after his son’s birth, and his wife, Phyllis, a miner’s daughter and domestic servant. John took pride in his Welsh roots, but he grew up partly in Rotherham, Yorkshire, where the family moved when he was four, and latterly in Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, where he had his secondary education.
He failed his 11-plus and suffered twin blows thereby: denied the bicycle his father had promised him had he passed (“that was all talk, it would have gone on a bet,” he said in his memoirs) and rejection by his first girlfriend, to whom he wrote a long letter – which she returned with his spelling mistakes corrected. He attended Grange secondary modern school for boys, and left at 15 to train as a porter and chef at hotels in Bala, Gwynedd, and Warrington, Cheshire, for two years before deciding to avoid national service by enlisting as a steward on Cunard liners.
Prescott worked on the company’s ships for eight years from 1955, and memorably served as personal steward to Anthony Eden on the RMS Rangitata. Tory MPs latterly thought it a huge joke to wave imaginary glasses at Prescott when he rose to speak in the Commons – “another gin and tonic, Giovanni”. His memory was that Eden had been patronisingly kind towards him and had presented him with a prize of bottles of beer for a boxing competition among the crew.
At sea he was increasingly engaged in union activity, leading a strike on the Mauretania in protest over the ship’s officers’ refusal to allow other ranks to wear whites in the tropics, and gradually being refused employment on ships throughout the line. The National Union of Seamen, with which he battled because of its rightwing leadership, nonetheless provided him with an escape route when it sponsored him to attend Ruskin College, Oxford, where he took a diploma course in politics and economics (1963-65).
From Ruskin, Prescott went on to study economics at Hull University (1965-68). Knowing that his career progression in the union was blocked because of perceived troublemaking, his decision to become a student meant that he could continue union activity in a town where many seamen lived. He became one of the leaders of the 1966 national seamen’s strike against working conditions: targeting the union for not doing more for its members, as well as the shipping companies themselves.
He was in the Commons public gallery in June 1966 to hear Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, denounce “a tightly knit group of politically motivated men” fomenting the strike to bring down the government. Wilson meant – and subsequently named – communists, though not Prescott, who was now a Labour candidate. Bill Hogarth, the NUS general secretary, told him that he would finish him off in the union but would not stop him becoming a sponsored MP – either that or exile to Australia as a distant union official.
Prescott duly became the Labour candidate for the safe seat of Hull East. He was elected at the June 1970 general election with a 22,000 majority over the Tory candidate, Norman Lamont.
In the Commons, Prescott’s early career saw him marked as an awkward leftwinger. He shared a flat with the like-minded Dennis Skinner for 18 years and voted for Tony Benn to become Labour leader in 1976 and deputy leader in 1981. He was regarded as a nuisance by the party leadership, to such a degree that James Callaghan as prime minister offered to nominate him to become a European commissioner in 1979 in order to get rid of him. Prescott, then a Eurosceptic, rejected the opportunity, realising it would end his Westminster career.
Nevertheless, his ascent within the parliamentary party was slow: 23rd in the 1980 shadow cabinet elections, sixth in 1983, third in 1985 as part of the leftwing Tribune/Campaign group slate and finally second in 1987. He opposed trade union legislation and, as the party’s employment spokesman in 1984, supported the miners, remaining a thorn in the side of successive Labour leaders. For several periods he was the party’s transport spokesman.
Prescott had to be reluctantly talked out of opposing Roy Hattersley as the party’s deputy leader in 1987 – an example, said Gerald Kaufman, of the bull backing out of the china shop. Subsequent attempts at the deputy leadership saw him beaten the following year and again in 1992, this time by Margaret Beckett.
But the leadership needed him to help get reforms past the party conference: in 1993 his barnstorming speech swung John Smith’s proposal for one member, one vote, in internal elections.
Following Smith’s sudden death, Prescott stood for the leadership, coming a distant second to Blair, but beating Beckett to the deputy’s job. Now at last within the leadership circle and seen as useful working-class cover by Blair, he swung a second vote at the 1994 conference to abolish clause IV. He revelled in being appreciated, but could not help noticing that after Blair became prime minister in 1997, he did not get many invitations to dine at Chequers.
In office, Blair gave Prescott responsibility for an extensive portmanteau of ministries: environment, transport and the regions, which were eventually taken off him in 2001, when he gained the title of first secretary of state instead, though he kept the local government portfolio. His junior ministers were privately scathing and his Commons performances were routinely mocked, especially when he stood in for Blair at PMQs.
He spoke too fast as his thoughts struggled to catch up with his utterances, mangled words and often lost the thread of what he was saying. It was, wrote Simon Hoggart, one of his chief tormenters in the Guardian, as if “every time Prescott opens his mouth it is like someone has flipped open his head and stuck in an egg whisk”.
Part of the cause, though he was too proud to mention it, was his dyslexia. Prescott told one journalist who had criticised his syntax that she was a bloody snob. Defensively he would say that he thought syntax was a new Tory tax, but the slights hurt a sensitive man.
His scrapes also made him easy to mock: there was his penchant for Jaguars – he had long owned a secondhand one, and now had a ministerial car too, so he became “Two Jags”, especially when, on his way to deliver a conference speech on reducing pollution, he had been driven 250 yards from his hotel to deliver it. His explanation that it was to protect his wife’s hair-do from the wind only increased the ridicule.
When he punched a young farm worker who hit him with an egg at a visit to Rhyl during the 2001 election campaign, he inevitably became “Two Jabs”. This incident did him little harm, though, because he had been oafishly provoked, and it was a case, as Blair said, of “John being John”.
However, a long-lens photograph of him playing croquet with his staff on the lawn of his ministerial grace-and-favour mansion at Dorneywood conflicted with his man-of-the-people image.
An affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple, 24 years his junior, lovingly related by the tabloids in 2006, did him no favours either. Once again Pauline came to the rescue, telling him she was not going to hide from the press as she had the builders in doing a new bathroom at their home in Hull.
When he discovered his telephone had been hacked by News of the World journalists he became a resolute campaigner for press regulation – though that did not stop him becoming a Daily Mirror columnist. He was a regular tweeter of his thoughts and presenter of television documentaries on class and the north-south divide.
Prescott by his own admission became a regular mediator between Blair and Brown, negotiating their frequent spats and soothing their egos. At one meeting Brown protested that his chair was too low, so Prescott, as he told Desert Island Discs later, fetched him a higher one; he then asked Blair if he too would like a higher chair, to be told, no, he was used to Brown looking down on him.
When Blair stood down in 2007, he resigned with him, but remained loyal to Brown until he retired from parliament at the 2010 general election. Prescott subsequently entered the Lords. Restless in retirement, he stood to become Humberside’s first police commissioner in 2012 but suffered the indignity of losing to a Tory. His memoirs, Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches, were produced with the journalist Hunter Davies as a ghostwriter in 2008.
As a minister his chief achievement was to lead the British negotiators at the Kyoto talks, which produced an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases in 1997. Other initiatives, such as the plan for regional assemblies for local government, petered out.
The integrated transport policy – encouraging people out of their cars with improved bus and train services – was quietly dropped. His greatest and most loyal service was to Labour: “I owe everything I have to the Labour party and the Labour movement: everything I have was given to me by them,” he said.
Prescott married Pauline Tilston in 1961. The couple had two sons: Johnathan – the spelling a compromise between his desire to pass on his name and her preference for an alternative version – and David.
Pauline and his sons survive him.
• John Leslie Prescott, Lord Prescott, politician, born 31 May 1938; died 20 November 2024
