John Prescott is no longer fit for purpose. He may be deputy prime minister but he is in no sense the prime minister’s deputy. Cabinet government does not recognise the post. The title is a bauble, not a job description.
Prescott claims to be victim of a toffee-nosed metropolitan mafia chattering against him. But that mafia is class-blind. The days when bad grammar, social gaucheness and ignorance of public affairs were equated with working class are long past — if they ever existed — and Prescott does nobody a service trying to revive them in his defence. He may evoke memories of Ernie Bevin, but he is no Bevin.
That is not why Prescott should resign. Nor should he resign because of his private antics, even when they became public, nor because of Dorneywood croquet or his behaviour when abroad. Social misbehaviour and sexual impropriety are hardly novelties in the world of politics. Nor should Prescott go because of the squalid intrusion of the BBC’s Today programme, the tabloid press and unsubstantiated accusations on the internet (a reminder that there are virtues in newspaper libel laws).
Nothing is crazier about British politics than that a hundred reasons are given for demanding a resignation other than the one that matters. Prescott should go because he is no good at his job, and never has been. He cannot justify a salary of £133,000 and a staff of 20.
Tony Blair has always treated him as an amiable bear licensed to roam the Westminster forest, sometimes howling with pain, sometimes eating jars of honey. He owed his position on the fringe of Blair’s court to being a rough-cast outsider, a joker whose support the court once needed in battles over one-member-one-vote and clause 4 at the 1993 and 1994 party conferences. As long as Prescott was still present, the stalwarts felt that toilers by hand were not forgotten.
Historians have paid much attention to Blair’s explicit Granita pact with Gordon Brown. It covered a pledge supposedly to stand down in Brown’s favour at a future date and a pledge to delegate to Brown the sweep of economic and domestic policy. Less attention has been paid to the implicit pact with Prescott. Unlike Brown, his loyalty to Blair was unquestioning. It held through the struggle for party reform, lending union backing and working-class credibility to new Labour’s programme. Prescott was Friar Tuck to Blair’s Merrie Men, making the sign of the cross over every liberty they took with the party’s history and policy.
Blair did not reward Prescott with friendship or collegiality and omitted him from his inner circle. The cabal of Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Philip Gould treated him as a useful jester. But Blair did not forget and in 1997 richly rewarded Prescott for his loyalty. He gave him one of the biggest and most intellectually demanding departments, a conglomerate of transport, local government, housing, devolution, environment and the regions, in effect the entire span of Britain’s physical condition. The job involved policy innovations over economic regeneration, railways and London Transport, city mayors and regional government, planning reform, even climate change and the future of the planet.
No one minister should have been given such responsibility, let alone one with no experience of office. Nothing so exposed Blair’s managerial ineptitude as the Prescott appointment. It implied that government jobs were political gongs, that fitness for purpose did not matter. Blair must have known he was opening Prescott to ridicule and humiliation, and to the steady removal of his power. By 2001 both transport and environment had been taken from him and the rest vanished earlier this year.
Prescott never mastered transport. He lost control of railways to the Treasury and then to Stephen Byers, merely presiding over “crisis summits” at which he threw public money at a plainly failed structure. He did not honour a commitment to reverse Tory privatisation, yet he subsidised rail companies at four times the cost of British Rail. Faced with an already nationalised London Tube he brazenly privatised it at a price of £500m in City fees, with no increase in service quality. A British minister must in some degree be on top of his brief. Prescott never was.
His understanding of planning and local government was next to zero. He failed to honour a manifesto pledge to end rate-capping and return business rates to local councils. He then became a target junkie. When in 1999 Blair boasted to the party conference that he had 900 targets for public services, Prescott retorted that he had 2,500 for local government and transport alone, unaware of the burden this placed on subordinates.
The 1999 Local Government Act gave him unprecedented power to intervene in council administration. This was capped by the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, among the most draconian laws passed by any peacetime government. It centralised all strategic planning in Whitehall, rendering Britain the only country in Europe where the public is allowed no control over the development of its local environment. From warehouses to turbines, new towns to motorways, power stations to domes, the DPM took power to decide everything.
Prescott went on to accept without question figures on so-called “housing need” from the planning Leninists in his department. In thrall to the National House Builders Federation he imposed targets for new housing estates on subordinate counties and districts, taking them to court if they resisted. He even revived the 1970s craze for demolishing acres of Victorian terraces in the north of England and Midlands, naming the campaign after Bomber Harris’s firestorm moniker, Pathfinder.
The oversight of London government was chaotic, involving the biggest act ever seen by parliament, the Greater London Authority Act 1999. Despite supposed devolution, Prescott’s Government Office for London actually grew until it was larger than it had been before the London mayor and assembly were invented. His building and safety inspectorates went bureaucratically berserk. Lobbied by high-rise architects, he overturned his own inspector to allow “Prescott Tower”, a hideous 50-storey block of luxury flats (the tallest in Europe) shortly to rise over Westminster at Vauxhall bridge. It will be his most visible and lasting memorial.
After Scots and Welsh devolution Prescott ran a spirited campaign for elected assemblies in English regions. Since he was already proliferating regional offices and quangos, the ambition to dust them with democratic accountability was commendable, even though they would lack real power. The project was a fiasco. Regionalism was widely seen as just a new and distant tier of administration between Whitehall and local government. Prescott insisted that where regional government was established, counties should go.
As a result the new regionalism fell at the first fence when, in 2004, a referendum in the northeast voted against a local assembly. Prescott’s reaction was astonishing. Rather than admit defeat he refused any more referendums and proceeded with regional government anyway. He decided to appoint assemblies as personal quangos. Regional agencies have now become unaccountable monsters. It was as if Blair had grown tired of adverse votes in the House of Commons and appointed MPs himself instead.
Prescott was in charge of a realm of public administration whose impact on the appearance and character of Britain is most lasting. It meant understanding the tension between town and country, between new and old forms of land use and between central direction and local democracy. It meant articulating those tensions in public. I do not think Prescott was uncaring. Unlike Brown and Blair he is not naturally authoritarian and is probably the last person to believe that the man in Whitehall knows best.
Yet he was the more dangerous for not knowing what he was about. He was simply floundering, reduced to dismissing his critics as snobs. Prescott now wanders like Lear upon the heath, his titles gone and only fools for company. The best advice is Shakespeare’s: “Vex not his ghost . . . He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer.”
The Blairites may have thought it amusing to burden such a man with such responsibility. It did no service to government or the country. It was also a grotesque joke to play on John Prescott.
