It is hard asking a man to reflect on his marital dramas while his wife is draping a napkin over your knees and serving you tea in a delicate china cup, but Pauline Prescott – wife of the former deputy prime minister – is not a woman to lower her standards to the level of the conversation. “Normally, I like the thick bread and smoked salmon,” she says. Her husband interrupts in bluff northern tones: “Do you mind!” he says, laughing. “Smoked salmon, for Christ’s sake! You’re supposed to say we eat corned beef.”

The Prescotts reside – I use the word advisedly – in a grand former Salvation Army home on the outskirts of Hull, where he has been MP since 1970. Here, he is not a banana-skin politician or a working-class hero but an Englishman in his castle, complete with turrets, eight bedrooms, servants’ staircase and electric gates (needs must); which is not bad going for the son of a maid who failed his 11-plus.

He is 70 this month and he still speaks with the rhythms of a northern club comic – droll and deadpan – and the mangled grammar that can make communication a guessing game. With Prescott, the search for the mot juste can lead you both down the dark and dangerous alleys of potential misunderstanding. (He says he now thinks that he may have “anorexia”. I must look astonished at the claim because he swiftly tries again. “No, no, what is it? Dyslexia!”).

This clunkiness defines the Prescott political brand, along with salty language and fisticuffs on the campaign trail, an affair with his diary secretary and – recently – an admission that he has suffered from the eating disorder bulimia.

Today, in his navy jumper and pink shirt, he looks healthy: a little slimmer, less puffy around the gills, hair still clinging on. He used to wind up Tony Blair, he says, laughing, by running his fingers through his hair while thinning Bambi looked on in envy.

Thanks to Pauline – there is no cook, no cleaner, no help – his home is calm, ordered, a spotless haven of white sofas and red carpets (as if royalty might be rolling up any minute). The silver-framed family photos have been buffed until they twinkle, some showing the Prescotts in their glamorous 1960s heyday: John winklepicker-slim and natty, Pauline smoulderingly beautiful – characters from A Taste of Honey or some other kitchen-sink drama, of which there have been many in this house.

On Sunday mornings Prescott’s phone would buzz with calls from the prime minister and his increasingly agitated chancellor, each seeking support for their grievances against the other.

When was Gordon going to co-operate? When was Tony going to go? “I just used to think, ‘Jesus Christ!’ ” Prescott says, laughing at the memory of those sessions. In the aftermath of his own affair two years ago, we should not be surprised that he managed to rescue his marriage, since he seems to have spent half a decade as a relationship counsellor. “I’d be trying to load the dishwasher,” says the long-suffering Pauline, “and John would say, ‘Be quiet, I’ve got Gordon on,’ or ‘Shhhh . . . I’ve got Tony on.’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t care who it is – would you mind taking them out of my kitchen’.”

When Prescott first walked into the room with hand outstretched, he looked suspicious; but, with a book to publicise and the soothing presence of his wife – buzzing about, fetching platters of perfectly triangular sandwiches, little yachts sailing on a cloud of garnish – he soon warmed up. He may be the original Coronation Street politician, but you don’t get much farther from the Rovers Return than his cosseted home life.

His study is a dark little bolthole, lined with books and trophies as well as paintings of the ships on which he sailed. On the Rangitata he was the former prime minister Anthony Eden’s steward in 1957. Once a year he meets “the Britannic lads”, with whom he sailed towards the 1960s tide of social and political change; they always tell him he hasn’t changed.

With Prezza, tribal loyalty runs deep. When I ask him about Gordon Brown’s current imbroglio, he frowns as if to steel himself against the mischief-making of the news-bloody-papers. What did he think of the PM’s climbdown on the 10p tax rate?

“Look, love, as far as I’m concerned, Gordon Brown has done more to alleviate poverty in this country than anyone, both in the fiscal framework and in the policies that we pursued. And the adjustments in the taxation changes are still ongoing.”

But was he wrong on the 10p tax rate? “It’s very hard to say whether people are wrong. Nobody works harder than Gordon trying to work out the details.”

For a decade Prescott was the deputy prime minister, butt of jokes, an old Labour dinosaur who reminded us all that beneath the suave geniality of Blair and the saturnine seething of Brown, the old up-the-workers spirit was still alive – if not exactly kicking. He had entered parliament to try to further the cause of the sailors he represented in the National Union of Seamen and chose to advocate the nationalisation of shipping and docks in his maiden speech. Nobody could be in doubt about his working-class roots: his family read the Daily Herald and considered Churchill a villain for sending in troops against striking Welsh miners.

At 27, while his comrades were out on strike, Prescott went to Hull University as a mature student so that he wouldn’t feel “inferior” when he met educated people – though what he calls the “beautiful people” of the new Labour elite only confirmed his class prejudices.

“I don’t know where they’ll get the awkward buggers from in the future,” he says, referring to MPs in the Commons. “People don’t feel independent enough to challenge – they’re caught up with their careers. I never minded getting sacked.”

In his early career, this was quite true. He made as many enemies within the National Union of Seamen as he did in the management. When he became too troublesome for Cunard and P&O and couldn’t find a job, he got a paper round. One Christmas he worked in a butcher’s shop in Chester.

“Paul [as he calls his wife] finished her hairdressing job earlier, so she’d wait for me in a cafe across the road and I’d signal with a string of sausages at the window when I was ready to leave.”

Since then, through the long absences of her part-time husband (he is away on European business two weeks out of every four), Pauline has perfected the running of her own life, which she quite clearly enjoys whether he is around or not. She may be traditional in many respects, but she does not require constant protection and validation from a man.

Among her haunts are the Chester races – which she attends with her friends, all dressed in boutique finery – and the Grosvenor hotel’s Arkle bar in Chester. Not long ago, her husband accompanied her. As they entered the five-star establishment, a waiter approached. “Ah, Mrs Prescott,” he cooed, “will it be your usual champagne?”

Her husband was quick to interject: “Been here before, has she? Jesus Christ! Am I the usual fella that walks in with her?” As he tells me the story, he chuckles to himself in amusement. “Champagne? There’s bloody champagne all over the house!”

But Pauline’s husband of 47 years doesn’t begrudge these treats; indeed, he is fiercely protective of her decision to devote most of her life to home and family – a choice not always respected by some of the highflying women in the feminist orthodoxy of Labour politics.

Pauline, he says, will hate the fact that we are sitting in his study, because he doesn’t maintain it to her high standards. “She wants you to see downstairs,” he says of the spacious reception rooms, “because she feels people think because she’s a housewife, she’s nothing. And, it’s not nothing, to do it all. Some of the powerful women think it’s not a job, but of course it is – she’s chosen to do it and she loves to do it.”

He won’t be more specific about who has dared to look down on Pauline, and maybe the condescension was not intended, but you can’t help feeling that “Westminster’s Sisters” (as he calls Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt et al) are guilty as charged.

In government Prescott always looked cross – like a man from a Rennies advert waiting to be passed his medication. He was old-style: the last minister to commandeer a battle bus for campaigning; storming, joking and even punching his way across the country (when someone chucked an egg at him in Wales, he initially thought the goo trickling down his neck was blood). He was the backroom, beer-and-butties negotiator against whom we could measure Blair’s slickness. Indeed, many felt that if Prescott’s presence in the cabinet signified anything, it was how far and fast his party had moved on – not necessarily a comfortable service to provide.

I first met him backstage at his party’s Scottish conference a few years ago, when I was shadowing the prime minister for a preelection profile. “John,” said the PM as his deputy stormed past, “this is Lesley White from The Sunday Times.”

“I don’t talk to bloody journalists,” Prescott muttered over his shoulder, not looking back.

Blair smiled and said: “Ah well, that’s John. He’s, um, a great guy.”

It turns out, however, that Prescott was the dove of peace, swooping between his two warring masters in the later days of the smouldering Downing Street feud. The past 10 years have been tiring for him: running a department he never wanted, long days, the scrapes, gaffes and mockery – but hardest of all was his role as custodian of the fragile detente between Blair and Brown, in which he was the elephant tiptoeing between eggshells from the beginning of the second term.

His way of reminding them that they had more in common than not was to contrast them to himself. “I used to say to Gordon and Tony, ‘You two buggers are the new Labour; I’m the only old Labour here.” The arguments, of course, revolved around when Blair intended to abdicate in favour of Gordon. As Blair kept promising to go and then changing his mind, their clashes became “increasingly personal”.

Did Blair, in the end, stay on just to spite Brown? “Towards the end, it got more . . . difficult,” Prescott says carefully. “Tony was frustrated that he wasn’t totally running government. They hadn’t lost control of their emotions. They weren’t about to belt each other. I mean, Gordon could go off like a bloody volcano, but Tony doesn’t like the full-frontal approach. It puts him off his tea.”

In 2002, at Dorneywood, Prescott’s official country residence in Buckinghamshire, Brown and Blair had a furious argument about foundation hospitals – then a new concept, which involved loss of Treasury control – while the deputy prime minister tried to play the conciliatory host. “There was no ‘Have a drink. Sherry, beer . . . ?’ None of that. Gordon came in and just launched into Tony.”

In meetings at Chequers, Sedgefield (Blair’s constituency home), Hull and elsewhere, Brown’s habit of retreating into sulks and silence eventually ruined any chance of improving relations.

Yet Prescott started to feel sorry for the chancellor. The heavyweight thinker and the freeform thumper had been mutually wary for more than a decade, though superficially they seemed to be a more natural coupling than Prescott and Blair: both, after all, were party diehards, with Brown exhibiting none of the Fettes manners and Oxford flamboyance that had once made Blair seem an exotic proposition.

But Brown did not back Prescott when he stood as deputy Labour leader in 1994, thinking him a trouble-maker. And according to Prescott, Brown was also worried that the older man would “challenge” him.

The distance between them was further extended when Blair explained to Prescott that it was Brown (and Peter Mandelson) who had vetoed his inclusion in a 1994 “secret” gathering on the south coast to plan strategy. Prescott is not a man to take such insults lightly – a lifetime of perceived slights has left him raw to the merest whiff of condescension – but he had to make amends with the all-powerful chancellor, and eventually began to sympathise with his serial disappointments.

“Gordon was unfairly treated,” he announces categorically. “But from Tony’s point of view, there were things that [Tony] couldn’t get on with, like joining the euro, because he wasn’t getting the cooperation.”

Did Brown ever ask Blair explicitly when his once-“sub-servient” junior partner was going to leave office? Prescott lets out a belly laugh.

“He always asked that, every time – when are you going? Then Tony would lay down certain conditions: he’d say, ‘Look, if we can get this done, win this election, do that’ . . . and then afterwards, it didn’t happen. Gordon believed Tony had said he’d go halfway into the second term. Tony denied it.

“I don’t think there was any doubt about it: there was an agreement. It had to be halfway into the second period – you couldn’t do a deal by saying if we win three elections you’ll get the job. There was less and less trust between them.”

Indeed, Prescott describes a meeting in his grace-and-favour apartment in Admiralty House in which Blair definitely promised to go. “He said, ‘Look, you know, I am gonna go’ – and then he didn’t do it. So he reneged on his promise. The feeling of not keeping your promises – it doesn’t encourage cooperation.”

In some ways the dispute was advantageous to the conciliator: Prescott was courted by both sides, like the child of separated parents who compete to win his affection. “They both wanted me to be with them. It was helpful. I couldn’t have rescued the Channel tunnel rail link, which had bond financing, without Gordon.”

Throughout the saga, Pauline cooked and cleaned and looked immaculate, as she always had: if John was living a Man at the Top fantasy, hers owed its determined elegance to the sets of Dynasty, one of her favourite shows. Years earlier, while Prescott was studying first at Ruskin College, Oxford, and then at Hull, she had kept the family afloat with her hairdressing and been a constant presence in the lives of their two sons, Johnathan and David (who recently sought selection as Labour candidate for his father’s seat). In short, her husband owes her – and he is encouraging her to accept offers to write her own book.

With her voluptuous hair and trim figure, Pauline is a Joan Collins of the north; she certainly deserves her moment in the limelight. Today she looks fabulous in a black trouser suit, belt with diamante clasp, high heels and lashings of mascara as she sips an afternoon glass of Pinot Grigio, looking out onto a picture-perfect garden. It is the sort of home of which most men married to working wives can only dream; especially those attached to the dreaded Labour feminist “Sisters”.

After marrying her handsome firebrand, she rose from hairdressing in Chester department stores to launching ships with champagne bottles (“There is a knack, you know,” she says with a smile). And her life has not been without emotional drama: she was reunited in 2001 with the son she gave up for adoption as an unmarried teenager; she was the one to discover her husband’s bulimia; and she has faced the ultimate betrayal. She wore dark glasses to go shopping in Asda after she found out, but the photographers still caught her – with perfect grace and an even better manicure. “We don’t have a life,” her proud husband says. “We have a bloody soap opera.”

In April 2006 Prescott admitted having had an affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple, a woman Pauline considered a friend. Tracey claimed she had been “seduced and used for sex”. Surely, I say to Prescott, this affair was an out-of-character mistake for him to have made.

“What do you mean by ‘out-of-character’?” he asks, with a smile. “That I’d never done anything before, you mean?”

Yes. “Go on. Next question.” He laughs. “That’s a joke. Look, these things happen. In the circumstances, all I could do was say, ‘Sorry, very sorry.’ I have no other comment to make. I’m not going to ask for understanding, or say that I wasn’t happy at the time.”

Does he feel angry or bitter towards Temple, who employed the publicist Max Clifford to hawk her kiss-and-tell exposé? “No. I’m not going to make it more difficult for her. She chose to sell the story. I was shocked about that. And I was quite staggered when I saw the photos. In some cases Tracey’s looking adoringly at me. Well, obviously, my wife saw that – but the relationship just wasn’t like that at all. In fact, when I apologised at [the Labour party] conference, I wasn’t even disowning Tracey because there wasn’t a relationship.” Prescott won’t be drawn on the details for fear of further wounding the wife who “showed a maturity greater than my own in that stupid situation”. But reading between the lines, we can deduce there was no deep feeling involved, not even the merest hint of romance – just a series of sexual encounters, months apart, between a stressed and susceptible public figure and a woman who was drawn to having a liaison with a famous name. They were photographed at parties, but those were staff parties; one doubts if they ever attempted a date, or even went out for dinner.

Was it worth it, I ask him. “No. I was going to say she might feel the same, but I suppose she got a quarter of a million out of it . . . ”

Does he carry the guilt with him every day? “I do deeply regret it, but what’s important is how you deal with it afterwards. It caused so much hurt, but I think you can see that, thank goodness, there is somebody here who’s strong and generous enough for it not to have caused a complete break in my life.”

At this point in the conversation, Pauline enters the study bearing a loaded tea tray. “Come in, love,” her husband says openly. “We’re talking about Tracey.” Pauline fusses over me and the Sunday Times photographer, seemingly at peace with the wretched subject, though she admits that she will “never forget” the day her husband came home, ashen-faced, to tell her about the affair and its imminent disclosure in the press, and warn her that he would probably have to resign.

“When I finished choking him,” she says carefully, “I started to think . . . I read every article in every paper. John told me I was crucifying myself but I just had to read it to see what everybody else was reading so I knew how to deal with it.

“I was about to have a lovely loo put in my hall . . . ” (“She had a Clochemerle opening of this bloody toilet!” her guffawing husband interjects.) Pauline continues: “John said I’d have to cancel all that, but I didn’t.”

The installation of her swish, trad-style WC was not only a focus and distraction but her salvation: its builders became her temporary protectors and its successful completion was a bright spot to look forward to in the general gloom.

“I wanted to be on my own, so John went to Dorneywood,” she says. “The photographers were up here, so when the builders were going for their lunch, I’d sneak out and I’d go up to Asda.”

They caught the plumber coming in with the loo, however. She laughs. “The headline was ‘Everything’s going down the pan at the Prescotts’!’ I’m being flippant – it was an awful time, but you’ve got to keep a sense of humour. I felt like locking myself away. But after a week, I went shopping and just carried on as normal.” Did she carry on speaking to her husband? “That’s another story. But some of the letters . . . what they suggested I should do to John just doesn’t bear repeating. There were a lot of very bitter women writing. And I thought, I can go one of two ways. Either I can be bitter and cloud my very existence, or I can move on.”

Prescott listens to this in uncharacteristic silence, head slightly bowed, all too aware of what he might have lost. He is not as thick-skinned as we might assume; in fact, his stress-related bulimia and a bizarre (for a politician) fear of being looked at in public bear testament to an unusual sensitivity. More troublesome than either of these, however, has been the chip on his shoulder that was planted when he failed his 11-plus and had to be packed off to Grange secondary modern in Ellesmere Port with the other rejects. His father, Bert, had promised him a bike if he passed; he didn’t get it.

“To be the oldest and not get the bike . . .” The perceived slights and put-downs have only accrued since then. Downstairs, in his hall, is a photograph of a painting of Margaret Thatcher addressing a packed chamber – commissioned while Neil Kinnock was Labour leader. At the time, Prescott was a frontbench spokesman, and in the photograph used by the artist, he is seated accordingly. In the painting, however, he has been demoted – by someone who briefed the artist – to the second-row loyalty bench: a Stalinist sabotage to which nobody ever owned up.

At least, one assumes the culprit wasn’t Blair. Even now, Prescott is full of admiration for the former PM, though they don’t socialise and have seen each other only once in the year since they resigned together. “We were never friends,” he says with a shrug, but you detect a certain hurt. Prescott clearly wasn’t always treated as a key figure in the shadow and actual government. And it rankled with him when he was excluded from meetings and kept in the dark by the modernising in-crowd – particularly when he deliberately wasn’t invited to that 1994 “secret” gathering, after which he called Blair “a little shit” to his face.

The shortage of invitations extended to the personal realm: why, Pauline would ask him, were they both so rarely entertained at Chequers (only twice in a decade)?

“I did ask Tony about it a couple of times, you know, but nothing . . . ” Prescott says. “I used to tell Pauline he didn’t do it [entertaining ministers and their wives]. Then it came out that all these celebrities had been entertained there, and cabinet ministers as well.”

On Pauline’s 60th birthday, though, they were invited to have dinner there with Al Gore, who had requested their presence. “Al Gore’s a friend of mine,” Prescott says with proprietorial pride, as if to say that he has had superstar fans of his own. “Yes,” Pauline adds supportively, “Al Gore wanted to see John.”

Had she felt upset at the dearth of invitations that came her way? She smiles tightly. “Oh, I would have loved to be invited to the fashion awards. I used to see them all at fashion week and think, ‘Gosh, I’d love to go and meet some of the designers’, because I love fashion. I did go once and Cherie kindly invited me to leave with her from Downing Street. I loved it. I met Carole Caplin, who was such an attractive woman – she was wearing an Alexander McQueen suit, which was beautiful.”

Her husband interrupts. “Yes, but it was also about having a meal or something like that. It’s part of the thing. There were No 10 dos, and I think Paul felt left out.”

In a fairer world, Mrs P would have been seated at fashion’s top tables, but there seems to have hung over the Prescotts the social cloud of not quite fitting in – lack of cash, or connections, or culture, or gay crystal-gazing hairdresser chums . . . who knows? It seems odd, however, that since Prescott did raise this sensitive issue with Tony Blair – an empathetic man and a superlative appeaser of indignation – more invitations “to meals and the like” weren’t issued forthwith.

“I think they just had their own friends,” Pauline offers graciously, but her husband isn’t convinced. “Well, they had other ministers there,” he counters. When I ask him what he thought of cosmic Carole, her dodgy ex-fiancé Peter Foster and the discounted Bristol flats that he helped Cherie acquire, he merely shakes his head. “I felt very sad for Tony – it was all out of his control.”

Essentially, Prescott was a three-piece-suite man in a new world of sofa government, a working-class hero surrounded by City lawyers and public-school boys, a brass-tacks minister who was irritated by “all these little advisory groups circulating around like flying bloody saucers”. Still, he felt able to back each new Labour reform as it arrived, though he was initially against the scrapping of clause 4 – “It was like a religion” – and the adoption of the name new Labour (“I never use it”). He was also cautious about the new city academies and the rest of the policies that finally killed the socialism he had once espoused so ferociously.

How did he stand it? Did he compromise too far in a career that he never quite felt intellectually worthy of pursuing?

“I used to say to [Blair] sometimes, ‘You’re just stroking my bloody arm and using me – you’re treating me like a performing seal. And I called him a bloody Tory. He’d just laugh. He’d ask me if I’d support a Tory who was switching sides, like Shaun Woodward; I’d say, ‘Sod him – chuck him back.’

“When [Blair] was working on the Olympics, he told me he was bringing this Tory into cabinet, Seb Coe, and I wasn’t going to object, was I?” He chuckles. “I said no, as long as he kept the Liberals out.” (In his book he reveals that he vetoed Blair’s wish to bring Paddy Ashdown into the cabinet in 1997.)

There was a price to pay for the high-powered job. In 2002 Prescott’s type 2 diabetes was made public; he was taken to hospital with pneumonia in June 2007; and he has now revealed that he suffered from bulimia over the course of 10 years. All that bingeing and purging on tins of condensed milk, digestive biscuits and M&S trifles left him puffy-faced and below par – but he wasn’t rumbled until the ever-vigilant Pauline, who often saw him only at weekends, noticed the symptoms, having followed the travails of Princess Diana.

Too ashamed to admit to his illness, her husband had been getting up too frequently during blow-out banquets at his favourite Chinese restaurant in Hull. (“In the end, all our friends knew what he was doing,” Pauline says.) At home, she could tell that someone was being sick in the loo and that food was mysteriously disappearing from the fridge. So, she packed him off to the House of Commons doctor, who referred him to a specialist, who was no help at all.

“He started asking me about the sex life of my parents,” Prescott says, “so that was just odd.

Then my office suggested I get nails put in my hands.”

A little extreme, surely. “No, I mean . . . what’s it called? . . . Acupuncture. What a way to spend Easter!”

Pauline notes quietly that her husband was grumpier than usual when the bulimia was at its height. “He used to take great delight in saying I’d put too much food on his plate. Then he’d sneak into the kitchen and I’d notice M&S sherry trifles [had disappeared]. The other day, when I went into Marks & Spencer and I was standing by the trifles, I felt so embarrassed. I thought, ‘I’ll kill him, I really will kill this man’ . . . ”

How did she cope with the moment? She suddenly laughs. “I asked for a discount on them, of course!”

In the end, Prescott scared himself. He began to notice frightening symptoms: a swollen face, acid reflux at night, titanic snoring, sleep apnoea (“I stopped breathing for so long that Pauline was in here looking for the insurance policy”).

And, in the sweaty grip of the compulsion, he seemed to undergo a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality change. “I’d say to Pauline, ‘I’m just going upstairs to get changed, love’, and [then] I’d have the packs of digestives and I’d come down a raging beast – so aggressive.

“We sent off hair at the back of my neck to see if I was allergic [to anything], but, no – it was the damn job. I began to realise the damage I was doing to myself. I began to worry some kind of cancerous growth might come [with] these acids.”

It is now two years since he last induced himself to vomit. “Gradually, you start eating properly and adjusting the portions. When I was feeling ill from eating too much, I used to persevere with it so I’d be uncomfortable; to stop that I had to be more disciplined about what I ate.”

Has his diet changed? “Not a great deal. I like fish and chips, I still raid the fridge – but I don’t eat as much as I used to. I exercise in the gym. The problem is, when I come home at the weekend, Pauline thinks I’ve not eaten. There’s so much on your plate, I’d sooner jump over it than try to eat it . . . ”

Does he think his bulimia was linked to depression?

“Not depression, love; total exhaustion.”

Interestingly, Prescott is a man of near-phobic aversions. He can’t walk into a hotel or a restaurant on his own. “I always get a seat facing the wall, where I can’t see other people.” His wife used to love dressing up for the opening of parliament, but her husband would never walk in with her when she was wearing one of her big, glamorous hats. (These days, though, you get the feeling that Pauline has won the right to what he calls her “Berlin wall of bloody hats”, and matching handbags, too, if she fancies them.)

“It was all right if it was raining because you could walk under them,” he quips. “But, seriously, I used to get my ministers to take her in and arrive later.” On one occasion he was so mortified that she wouldn’t remove her hat for a trip on the London Underground that he travelled in a different carriage.

Today, Prescott claims to have mastered his issues with both chips and chippiness. The stress of Westminster has fallen away and he enjoys counting both his domestic blessings and what he sees as his successes in office: the Channel tunnel link, Kyoto, all the pamphlets he wrote that worked their way into white papers.

“Disagree with me, but don’t say I was a man who did nothing,” he says. “Don’t call me a buffoon. I resent that.” (In his book he quotes Denis Healey – “who had never been a fan of mine” – as saying that he is “extremely intelligent”.)

Some things will never change. Having dispatched his security team when he left office in the hope of enjoying a less constrained social life, he is still bashing aggressors in the street. An antiIsrael protester accosted him and Pauline while they were shopping on Oxford Street recently, lurching towards them aggressively, waving his placard and shouting about the rights of Palestinians. The zealot escaped a punch only with the aid of fleet footwork.

“I tried to grab him,” says Prezza. “In my best northern accent, I shouted, ‘What did you say, lad? Come here!’, but he ran to the back of the crowd. That sort always do.”

Then a local yob hurled some unintelligible abuse when he and Pauline were sitting in the Jag eating an ice-cream. Prescott flung open the door, jumped out and chased after him. To his dismay, that young lionheart also disappeared into thin air.

He still regrets being deterred by photographers from stamping his foot on the throat of the Chumbawamba singer who threw an ice bucket of water all over the Prescotts at the 1998 Brit awards after “shouting crap about the dockers”. However, he did manage to deliver a punch to the singer’s ribs.

When it comes to his most famous fracas, he has no regrets; in fact, he told his boss that he would never apologise for thumping the egg-thrower.

“Tony said, ‘You shouldn’t have done it. You’re not an ordinary guy, John – you’re the deputy prime minister.’ But I never saw myself in that way. I want people who use that sort of aggressive behaviour to learn that it’s not an easy option, that there are consequences, that the people they are trying to bully fight back.”

Prescott remains MP for Hull East until the next election and will continue as leader of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, which he joined in the 1970s.

Pauline, of course, wants him to go to the Lords. “I say, ‘What do you want to be Lady Prescott for? You’re a lady already!”

After all this time, he still can’t quite understand how he came to be cast as the fool and jester in a drama where he was really the tireless peacemaker behind the big black door. The unfairness of his public image still puzzles him.

“On television last week there was a picture of Tony on a bloody horse, with a Stetson and cowboy boots, being led by Bush. And Bush has got hold of the reins! How come I got all the crap, when you’ve got a picture like that?”

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