In America it was Barack Obama who led his party via the valleys of Cyberspace, through Facebook groups, YouTube videos, Twitter and blogs to the promised land of a politics that energised younger generations and revolutionised electoral campaigning.

In Britain, with a year or so to run until the next election, and with Labour’s online presence in disarray following the email smears controversy, a more unlikely figure is preparing to stand at the epicentre of a whirlwind of social networking and lead the revolution.

Today, at the Young Labour Conference in Kent, John Prescott will launch an Obama-style internet campaign, calling for voluntary donations via his blog and his Facebook page to fund a bus tour. His online supporters can follow his progress on Google Earth and via online videos, blog posts and Twitter updates and assemble, like a flash mob, to meet him on high streets across the north of England.

“We have got to use this technology for serious effect,” he told The Times on Thursday evening, after delivering a lecture to an audience of young black political activists from Operation Black Vote on how to harness the power of the blogosphere. “I got the invite to speak on my Blackberry,” he explained, casually. “I replied on my Blackberry and said I’d come.”

The topic for the evening was ‘Voter Empowerment’ and ‘The search for the UK’s Barack Obama’. Various online gurus were in attendance, but the star turn, fresh from two successful online campaigns against the Royal Bank of Scotland’s proposed bonus payments and the lady who threw green soup at Lord Mandelson, was Mr Prescott.

“Yes, I’m white,” he said, stepping up to the podium. “But I do have a Blackberry!” He waved it in the air triumphantly. “I now have four thousand friends on Facebook!” he said. “In politics I would be lucky to have half a dozen.”

The remarkable transformation of John Prescott into an online heavyweight began barely nine months ago, when he posted his first blog on the website LabourHome. Only two years before, during a particularly excruciating interview on the Today Programme, Mr Prescott assessed his knowledge of the online world as follows: “I think it’s called the internet, isn’t it, or blogs or something? I’ve only just got used to letters…I haven’t got into all this new technology.”

Since his debut blog, however, he has embraced the new technology with the same boundless enthusiasm that Mr Toad showed for the motorcar in Wind in the Willows. He is now careering down the information superhighway, hooting delightedly at all he encounters.

When the Conservative blogger Iain Dale posted an article querying whether he wrote his blog himself, Mr Prescott posted a humorous video in response. “I take it all back,” wrote Mr Dale.

Soon he was inquiring of his Facebook following whether to purchase a Blackberry or an I-Phone. “They said John, buy both,” he said. “You have got two jags haven’t you? I asked them what laptop I should buy. They said don’t bother, sit by a civil servant on a train and they’ll leave you one.”

After years struggling to articulate his thoughts at the dispatch box and on the Today programme, Mr Prescott was like an artist who had finally found his medium. An idiosyncratic style plays well in the blogosphere, the dialogue there is in many respects similar to the back-and-forth politics of the stump. The prominent blogger Paul Staines, better known by his online alias Guido Fawkes, wrote: “Prescott is the real deal, authentic and engaging.”

“I walked here by RBS headquarters,” he said on Thursday evening. “I could see the electricity’s turned off. Canary Wharf? They should call it Treasury Wharf now!” Observations such as these are scattered through his blog posts, which he writes on paper for his son David, 38, to type up. He then responds to comments directly on his Blackberry. “It took a while,” he said. “But I’ve now got my fingers in the right position.”

And then there is the video blogging. “You can get on TV almost immediately now,” he said. He relishes his newfound power. “Nick Clegg puts up a website, but whose Clegg?” he told The Times, as he left the building, Blackberry in hand. “People like to think it’s a character they know. I say it as it is. It suits my kind of campaigning.”

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