“Every leader needs a John Prescott,” Tony Blair liked to say of his deputy. “I couldn’t have made all the changes I made, and needed to make, in the Labour Party without the support of John.”
He was right. One of the earliest attempted Cabinet revolts of the New Labour period was over the Millennium Dome. During a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prescott while Blair was travelling, speaker after speaker raised doubts about the costs, the content and the viability of the scheme assuming that the question of whether to go ahead was an open one. It wasn’t.
As Deputy Prime Minister, and Chair of Cabinet, it fell to Prescott to sum up. Adopting full Labour conference mode — where traditionally he made the closing speech — he delivered a magnificent peroration, circuitous and full of digressions but successfully summarising the Cabinet as being in full agreement with the Dome proceeding. This was Prescott doing what he did best: loyally holding a position, fixing a problem and smoothing over differences with his own inimitable rhetoric.
Not really smooth enough, though, for the modern televisual era, he was an “authentic” politician before that became a populist calling card. When he was egged during a general election campaign, he immediately swung a professional-looking punch at the demonstrator. Referring to the incident, Blair said: “John is John”, adding, “I’m lucky to have him as my deputy”. The voters got it. And they would today: Prescott would be the ideal figure to take on Nigel Farage and the Reform party.
Prescott was a giant figure in the modern Labour Party with a biography that came from a different era. The son of a railwayman, he left school at 15 to become a hotel porter, where his talent was recognised. He was sent to catering college, where, characteristically, he ended up being sacked in a dispute about pay and conditions. In 1955, he joined the Merchant Navy where he became an activist for the National Union of Seamen (NUS). For John, the fight for social justice, and for socialism, almost always had a strongly personal element. It gave him the passion that powered his career.
He channelled his radicalism into education when he went to Ruskin College in Oxford, where he stayed active in the union and was a key figure in the 1966 NUS strike that led the Wilson government to declare a state of emergency. Despite being at loggerheads with the government on this issue, Prescott’s talents were recognised by the Labour Party and in 1970 he was elected MP for Kingston upon Hull East, which he represented for 40 years.
Always on the Left, there was a pragmatism to Prescott that tempered his ideology. Initially a passionate supporter of Michael Foot for leader, Prescott admitted in his autobiography, Pulling No Punches, that he realised early on in the leadership that he had been mistaken. He may have been a great man, but Foot was “not a party leader”.
Left pragmatism became Prescott’s hallmark as he rose through the ranks during the 18 long years of opposition after Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. Another of his traits was his dogged loyalty to the leader. In 1993, John Smith was having trouble pushing the “one member one vote” constitutional change through Labour conference. It was a key plank of his project for modernising Labour’s links with the unions. If it failed, then Smith’s authority would have been damaged. Prescott swung in with a barnstorming speech and pulled conference on side.
This ability to rally the party and the wider movement behind reforms is what made Prescott such a significant figure. Never an ideologist for Blair and Brown’s New Labour party, nor a strategist like Peter Mandelson, Prescott was a persuader reaching the parts of the movement that others in the leadership couldn’t. He was critical to delivering Blair’s changes to the Labour Party’s historic Clause 4 — the “socialist objective” with another great Prescott speech helping it over the line.
But his great political abilities weren’t matched with an equal track record of achievement. His super-ministry at the beginning of the New Labour government — the Department of the Environment, Transport, and the Regions was simply too large. Yet also, in key areas, he received too little political support from the centre. The failed attempt to a Regional Assembly for the North-East was partly to blame for the political status quo that led to Brexit. If the referendum had been won, the argument goes, then similar assemblies would have been established across England during the Blair and Brown years. As they matured and developed, they would have brought politics closer to voters and drained a lot of the discontent and alienation that fuelled Brexit. And also, had the Labour government put the same energy, resources and professionalism into winning the assembly referendum as the party put into winning the 1997 and 2001 general elections, then the career of Dominic Cummings might have had a different trajectory. Cummings’ success in defeating the North-East Assembly was his launchpad into political campaigning.
Nor did Prescott ever receive the full credit for his innovative policy thinking. As Shadow Transport Secretary, he was the first major Labour figure to explore public-private partnerships to invest in modernising the railways. This was his political pragmatism in action — if fiscal prudence meant a cap on public spending, then other sources had to be tapped.
His lasting legacy was probably the Decent Homes programme — the investment programme that brought England’s two million council houses up to modern standards with new bathrooms, windows and central heating. This measure transformed the quality of life for working-class families — but, in a failure characteristic of New Labour, there wasn’t enough publicity about the programme or its benefits. Blair and Brown too often preferred to redistribute by stealth. It was a missed opportunity, not just because it was a major progressive achievement that went uncelebrated but also because every ounce of Prescott’s being would have made him a superlative message carrier on this issue.
More than anything, Prescott took politics seriously — particularly his responsibility as Deputy Leader to reduce the tensions at the top. He made regular attempts to smooth the TBGBs — as the friction between Blair and Brown was called. He would recount how he had tried to host dinners between them at Admiralty House, the Deputy Prime Minister’s official residence. “There wasn’t,” he recalled, “a full set of matching chairs for the dining room table. Gordon came in and he saw that there was a big chair and a little one — and he immediately sat in the taller one so that Tony always had to look up to him for the whole of dinner.”
Prescott may have had presence and authenticity, but he also had the most priceless political gift of all — wit. Famous for his taste for Jags — good, fast British cars — he was once asked by fellow MP Austin Mitchell “How can you drive a Jag?” “Simple, Austin!” came Prescott’s swift response “You put a key in the ignition and turn it!” As a No. 10 staffer, I was used to his gentle mockery when I covered housing and regeneration — he called us “Mekons” after the legendary Martian enemy of Dan Dare in the “Eagle” comic. And when I was Political Secretary, Prescott complained that I was being too tough on backbenchers — which was actually the job of the Whips, not me — leading to Blair passing on the complaint to me and adding his own advice: “You only have to break one of their legs, John. Not both.”
When I saw Prescott at conference, he would inevitably tell me off about one or other position I had taken on TV or social media. Though he often refused to know me. “Who the heck is John McTernan?” he once said in response to a journalist’s question. In the end, John Prescott’s bark was always worse than his bite. And his love of, and loyalty to, the Labour Party was a model to aspire to. The outpourings of warmth and affection for him today are real — and a measure of what Labour and the country have lost.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/