Tony Blair said this morning that he felt “devastated” by the death of John Prescott, his deputy when he was prime minister. And no wonder. Prescott was, he observed, the “yin to his yang”, or possibly the other way round, someone from a less privileged background from him, a different aspect of the Labour Party. And that’s precisely why his death feels like the demise of real Old Labour, the working class part of it.
I knew John Prescott a little: lunch at Westminster, chats at the Irish Embassy or the Labour conference. He was pleasant, affable, humorous, in my experience. I took him to task for saying at the start of the New Labour venture that he wouldn’t talk to Tories. Why not? I demanded. “I don’t like Tories,” he said unanswerably. He softened over time, but some Tories did poke him with sticks, like the ones who’d loudly ask him to fetch the drinks on account of him having been a steward on a Cunard liner (miraculously, he never punched them).
