John Prescott: UK deputy PM who packed a punch

Prescott, who died aged 86, had a colourful 5-decade career in British politics

LONDON: John Prescott was a merchant seaman who dropped out of school but thrived in politics by bringing working-class credibility to the modernising government of former British prime minister Tony Blair as his deputy.

“We are deeply saddened to inform you that our beloved husband, father and grandfather, John Prescott, passed away yesterday (Wednesday) at the age of 86,” his family said on Thursday.

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Blair, the privately educated lawyer who appointed working-class Prescott to help appease the Labour left as he moved the party to the centre ground, said he was “devastated” at Prescott’s death.

“There was no one quite like him in British politics,” he told BBC radio.

Keir Starmer, who became Labour’s first prime minister since 2010 after a landslide general election win in July, called Prescott “a true giant of the Labour movement”.

Prescott had a colourful five-decade career in British politics, becoming one of his most recognisable figures.

His heyday came during his 1997-2007 spell as deputy prime minister in a Blair government that returned a rebooted version of Labour to power at the height of the “Cool Britannia” craze.

Blair had abandoned much of Labour’s socialist dogma and depended on Prescott to shore up the financial and political backing the party traditionally received from trade unions.

“We are all middle class now,” Prescott said weeks before Labour claimed the first of an unprecedented three successive general election victories.

But he might be remembered best as the man whose short fuse and verbal slip-ups made “Prezza” a mainstay of the tabloids - and the butt of Conservative rivals’ jokes.

“John is John,” Blair said after Prescott punched a protester angered at Labour’s move to ban fox-hunting threw an egg at him during the 2001 general election campaign.

The images were beamed around the world and Prescott later joked that he had told Blair: “You told us to connect with the electorate, so I did.”

But his instinctive left jab, far from causing an outcry seemed only to endear him further to the public after he pleaded self-defence.

Magic Kingdom

Prescott was the son of a railway worker and a maid who failed his first set of secondary school exams and dropped out at the age of 15.

He ended up working as a steward on an ocean liner and was ridiculed years later in parliament by a political rival’s taunt of “mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni”.

One biographer said this moment engendered a visceral hatred in Prescott for the Conservative party that turned the amateur boxer into an even more combative political force.

Prescott’s plain-spoken union activist’s ethos proved vital to Blair as he shifted the party from the left toward the election-winning centre ground.

Blair said the contrast between him and the party’s number two could not have been greater. But he also valued Prescott as a loyal defender whom “you could count on” in a tight spot.

The young premier rewarded Prescott by handing him a sprawling series of ministries that were soon dubbed the “Magic Kingdom” by the press.

He played a major role in securing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

But his main role may have been one of constant mediation between Blair and his more leftist finance minister - and eventual successor - Gordon Brown.

Prescott’s importance to the uneasy Blair-Brown partnership helped him survive a range of scandals and blunders that might have sunk others’ careers.

‘Walk the table’

Prescott was dubbed “Two Jags” in the tabloid press for getting a chauffeur-driven government limousine in addition to his own Jaguar sedan - a perk that naysayers said discredited his green cause credentials.

That nickname morphed into “Two Jabs” after the 2001 brawl in north Wales that became known as “The Rumble in Rhyl”.

Prescott preferred using faxes to email and once compared public relations spin doctors who hung around Downing Street to “gnats on an elephant’s backside”.

He also repeatedly flubbed his lines - his mangled English becoming the stuff of legend among political sketch writers.

Many were left scratching their heads after Prescott told parliament in 2004 that the only solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was to “walk the table”.

He also displayed an acute awareness of Britons’ perception of his outsized persona.

“When I do die, after 50 years in politics, all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales,” he told The Guardian newspaper in early 2019.

And he felt no regrets.

“Politics has allowed my personality, my aggression, my passion, to play a full part,” Prescott said.