Labour will always need a John Prescott

In divided times, the former deputy prime minister held the labour movement together.

Photo by Jim Hutchison / ANL / Shutterstock

People say John Prescott made an impact on Britain. He certainly made an impact on me: a series of vigorous jabs to the chest as, late one night in a deserted Labour conference corridor, he called me an effing bastard, saying he would “get me” in a spate of fruity language which visibly shocked the young civil servants around him.

Although I was political editor of the BBC at the time and had just reported on the conference for the late-night news, I was confused. I couldn’t remember anything I’d said that could have produced such a volcanic response from the deputy prime minister. He charged off again. I stood there, silently puzzling. Then he suddenly emerged from round another corner, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “sorry about that… wrong bloke.”

We laughed about it later. It was just another example, as Tony Blair famously put it, of “John being John”. He was lovable and could be charismatic; but he was also a man who carried within him the perpetual possibility of danger. A good amateur boxer with a short temper, I suspect this hint of menace stood him in good stead when acting as the loyal go-between during the tensions between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Blair seems genuinely grief stricken by the loss of the man who stood against him originally for the leadership, and who would have been a perfectly plausible Labour leader himself. He has said that without Prescott he would not have won three successive election victories.

That is quite the statement. Because John Prescott was never an enthusiastic New Labour man – “nouveau Labour” as he’d say with a sneer. But he reached a working class audience, already then sceptical of smoothly spoken London liberals, in a way no other Labour figure of the time could have done. He was very different in his politics from Ernie Bevin, but in that respect he was the Ernie Bevin of the 1990s.

Blair gave him a monster sized department to run, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Although he scored some important successes, notably in leading Britain’s delegation on the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, this sprawling remit was simply too much. The gains on transport were hardly dramatic. On regional devolution, his ambitious plans for assemblies were destroyed by the 2004 north east referendum. His opponent was a certain Dominic Cummings. The department was abolished in 2006.

But arguably, Prescott’s greatest achievement was simply keeping the Blair and Brown show on the road for so long; and holding the support of the labour movement together at a time when the left was deeply distrustful of one another. He was the human glue without which the New Labour experiment might well have come apart.

And as a relatively rare working-class leader in a Britain still being reshaped by the post-Thatcher big money culture, he suffered a lot from media and conservative snobbery, and cheerfully – mostly cheerfully – shrugged it off. In all of that, he leaves behind a legacy. Angela Rayner, today’s Deputy Prime Minister, tells me she has learned a lot from him, above all the importance of “owning your space”. Indeed, a couple of years ago, she told me that her ambition was to be “John Prescott in a skirt”. Judging by her increasingly confident and witty performances in the House of Commons, she can congratulate herself that his spirit lives on.