John Prescott has died, leading to a flood of tributes and comments about the working class hero of the New Labour project. That framing of Prescott is good for headlines but the reality was inevitably more complicated than that. It’s too shallow and narrow to describe Prescott as the lone working class voice in an essentially middle class political enterprise.
Was Prescott really working class? Not in his own words. As early as 1996, before he became deputy prime minister, he said he no longer regarded himself as working class: ‘I was once, but by being a Member of Parliament, I can tell you, I’m pretty middle class.’
The idea that your origins should define you forever is deep-rooted in Britain
He was quite right in that, of course. Someone who earns a salary that’s significantly above the national average, for doing work that involves talking and writing, surely can’t be described, without qualification, as ‘working class’. They can, as Prescott did, remember and honour, the culture and ways of their upbringing, but they can also embrace the mores of the position they occupy later in life.
Social class is eternally fluid, even if some people don’t like that – because some people don’t like complexity or nuance; it’s much easier and more comfortable to understand the world in simple terms. In the class debate, simplicity means dividing people into neat and distinct categories, between which there can be no movement.
Hence the mockery – from people of all backgrounds and classes – of Prescott and his thoughts on class. In a reference to his time as a steward on cruise liners, Tory MPs of a certain vintage thought it was simply hilarious to shout ‘Two G&Ts, Giovanni’ at him when he spoke in the Commons.
That was routine snobbery, but his suggestions that he had become middle class by dint of his job were the object of much greater scorn. Further derision was directed at his taste for slightly flash cars – second-hand Jaguars, mainly. His tabloid nickname of ‘Two Jags’ said far more about British ideas of class and status in the 1990s than about the man himself: how dare a lefty with a regional accent enjoy and own nice things? (A quick glance at a lot of commentary on Angela Rayner today shows things haven’t changed much – how dare she wear expensive clothes and go to the opera?)
Likewise Prescott’s ostentatiously large, turreted house in Hull – how vulgar! But Prescott understood what that house meant for class and status far better than his critics did. He would half-joke that the locals in his seat called it his castle. He knew that his position and – relative – wealth meant he was in a vastly different position to that of the working class people he represented in Parliament. And that it makes no sense to describe someone solely by reference to what their father or grandfather happened to do for a living.
But the idea that your origins should define you forever is deep-rooted in Britain. Some people still play to this tune: the recent general election saw an impeccably professional Labour candidate suggest he could relate to working-class voters in the north-east because his grandfather had been a miner.
Prescott was quite right that he could grow up working class then develop middle-class characteristics; many of us can sympathise with that, and the difficult internal tensions it can create. But that’s a hard thing for people embedded in a fixed-class mindset to accept. It wasn’t just middle-class snobs who mocked Prescott for his thoughts on class, sadly.
His own father, Bert Prescott, publicly ridiculed his son’s suggestions that he had joined the middle classes, creating a deep rift between them. In 1999, Bert Prescott told the Sun:
John is the son of a railwayman and grandson of a miner. He worked as a steward on ships serving drinks to well-to-do passengers. If that’s not working class, I don’t know what is.
John told me he was possibly born into the working class, but because of the salary range of a member of parliament he considered himself middle class. It seemed bloody stupid to me. John is working class, that’s that.
But that wasn’t that. Bert Prescott was wrong about class and his son was right. So ignore the ‘working class’ headlines about John Prescott. Both the issue and the man were more complicated and interesting than that.
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