How John Prescott got the better of me

I’ve had the pleasure of doing a column for the News of the World for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I’ve had the newspaper’s title on my conference pass. I wish I’d done it earlier. It seems to drive Labour people quite mad. The ushers here recoil when they check my pass, some tut, others hiss. “Is that newspaper still going?” one of them asked me on the way in. Um yes, it’s the largest selling newspaper in the English-speaking world and its readers are the type who tend to decide British elections. The sort of people whom Labour seems to have given up on, as it indulges itself in the kind of pre-Kinnock policies which proved rather less than popular in the 1980s. Tax the rich, spend spend spend, etc. Listening to the debates here, I can see why the Blairites are so nervous. It’s possible that what remains of New Labour will be buried in any future leadership battle.
 
Anyway, back to The News of the World. I’ve just done a BBC1 Politics Show where they introduced me as being from both The Spectator and The News of the World. As a result of this I was savaged by the Labour-supporting audience. Perhaps vengeance for my being rude to John Prescott in the middle bit, which was off-air . I have to say Prescott came out of the exchange better than I did. We had a set-to about debt figures, jobs and immigration. “How many of those 3m new jobs you were talking about are immigrants?” I asked. “I have no idea” “Two-thirds.” “Funny how these Tories are fixated with immigrants – I’m pleased Poles are getting new jobs.” I tried shouting out at him “five million on benefits” but he had the camera and the microphone and didn’t flinch. Had it been on air, it would have no doubt left me looking like a refugee from Speaker’s Corner. For all his many faults, Prescott is pugnacious and unflappable and is doing a brilliant job for Gordon Brown right now.
 
I’m playing the pantomime villain again tonight, on a panel with Ed Balls and Jon Cruddas at the Fabian Society. When I took the job of political editor of The Spectator, Peter Oborne warned me about this. “When you sit on a panel, have a look around. If you can’t see who the bad guy is, it’s probably you.”