The death of Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the age of 86 also marks the passing of the old Labour party.
Prescott was a bruiser both in the physical and the political sense. He was unashamedly working class, contemptuous of the effete intellectuals who had taken over Labour, and ready to hit out at the party’s enemies with both fists and tongue.
Prescott will be most remembered for the moment during the 2001 general election campaign when his left hook connected with the jaw of a 29-year-old protester, Craig Evans, who had thrown an egg at him as Prescott arrived at an election meeting at Rhyl in his native Wales.
Evans was not seriously hurt, and the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair laughed off the incident as ‘John being John’. But Prescott’s gut reaction was perhaps a symbolic watershed moment in the transformation of Labour from being the organised arm of the working-class trade union movement to the middle-class party of white-collar public service employees we all know today.
Prescott, who was born in Prestatyn in 1938 to a solidly working class Labour family (his railwayman father Bert was a Labour councillor) emerged from the National Union of Seamen after his early career in the Merchant Navy. A militant member of the union’s executive committee, Prescott and his comrades were denounced by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson during the Seamen’s strike of 1966 as ‘a tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ who were being manipulated by communists.
Earlier in his ocean-going career, Prescott had demonstrated his pugilistic skills when he won a boxing tournament on board a Cunard liner cruising to New Zealand. Ironically, the prize for the contest – two bottles of beer and two hours’ overtime – was presented to Prescott by the former Tory Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, who was convalescing on board the ship after the Suez crisis.
First elected to parliament in 1970 as MP for Hull East, after graduating from Hull University, Prescott rose in Labour’s ranks as a firm left-winger staunchly on the trade union side during the industrial strife of the early 1970s that finally brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath. With Labour increasingly dominated by the left, Prescott stood twice for the party’s deputy leadership and in 1994 aimed for the leadership itself when he was defeated by Tony Blair.
Prescott was the popular figurehead of traditional Labour, and Tony Blair was forced to make him Deputy Prime Minister with a super ministry responsibility for environmental and transport policy after Labour’s landslide victory in 1997. Power tamed the old firebrand, and Prescott became an unlikely champion of fighting climate change and restricting the use of petrol driven vehicles, despite having the use of a ministerial limousine and his own Jaguar car that won him the nickname ‘two Jags’.
Prescott was much mocked by the Conservative press for his enjoyment of the fruits of power – such as his occupancy as Deputy PM of the country mansion Dorneywood, where he was photographed playing croquet on the lawn. On one occasion during a Labour conference he used his ministerial car to drive a few yards to protect his wife Pauline’s hairdo.
Prescott’s marriage survived the exposure of an affair he had with a civil servant, and despite his suspicion of the middle-class dominated New Labour, his major role in government was to act as a conciliator between the party’s warring wings. Ironically, given his well-deserved reputation for pugnacity, he acted as a peacemaker between the increasingly hostile supporters of Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown, who was eager to seize the premiership.
When Blair finally succumbed to the pressure and surrendered office to Brown in 2007, Prescott went with him and stood down as an MP in 2010. His final political role was as a Labour peer in the House of Lords.
Tributes were paid to Prescott as the last giant of old Labour after his death in a care home, where he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Despite his fiery personality, he will be remembered with genuine affection as a very human face in an increasingly impersonal and sour-natured political world.
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