Good news for everyone except Mr Chu: the post-Prescott era dawns at last

On Wednesday, when John Prescott finally steps down as Deputy Prime Minister, the city of Hull will breathe a collective sigh of relief. Just as Joseph Chamberlain defined Birmingham in the 1870s, so Prezza personified Hull for the past decade. Chamberlain built a great industrial city — but Prescott has reduced this proud, historic port, whose eastern parliamentary constituency he has held since 1970, to something approaching a national laughing stock. It seems unlikely, for example, that Hull would have been named the ‘crappest’ of Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, had Prescott not lived there. And I fear that the jokes about the proximity of Hull and hell would not have gained such currency had Prescott led a blameless life of public service. So it’s fitting that Prescott’s legacy is a Liberal Democrat council in what had for so long been a socialist heartland.

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Prescott or no Prescott, Hull can be intimidating to outsiders. As a young and callow news reporter, I visited the city on two occasions. The first was to investigate the disappearance and probable murder of a glamorous housewife named Gloria Bielby. Although Gloria came from a middle-class background, she seemed to have mixed with some of the baser elements of Hull society and I found myself trawling desperate sink estates in search of clues. On one estate a policeman pointed to a boarded-up butcher’s shop and told me he believed Gloria had been chopped up and put in some meat pies.

My second visit was less traumatic, but possibly more telling. A terrible row had broken out in my home city of York over the siting of a bail hostel, full of all sorts of undesirables, in a residential area.