WHEN John Prescott was 13, he felt moved to report his father to the police. “My dad’s a magistrate,” he said. “I’ve seen him kissing another woman.” The desk sergeant at the local station in Chester was understandably taken aback. Young John was told to go home. And not to tell his mother.
What effect the episode had on the Deputy Prime Minister more than 50 years later is anyone’s guess, although he appeared to keep his wife in the dark about his own dalliance until the very last moment. But what is clear is that Mr Prescott was, always has been, and is always likely to be one of our most surprising public figures.
Disclosure of his two-year affair with Tracey Temple was a genuine bolt from the blue for fellow ministers and colleagues. They, like most bystanders, would readily identify with the shock, if not the sense of personal betrayal, expressed by Barrie Williams, Ms Temple’s fiancé: “I can’t believe the woman I wanted to marry slept with John Prescott.”
However, Mr Prescott’s relationship with the front pages has always been tumultuous. And the public’s association with him tends to be conducted in emotional extremes.
His unscripted endeavours over recent years — a fling, a punch, a long-lost stepson and a highly colourful but wounding spat with his father about whether he was working or middle-class — invariably elicit a strong response.
His wife Pauline’s cameos, such as the 250-yard drive to protect her hairdo at a party conference, have provided rich material for the Prescott soap opera, as have his son Jonathan’s property travails. “What you see is what you get,” has been the Prescott justification for his blunt character.
Rarely have those words carried a more explicit meaning than in the pictures in yesterday’s Daily Mirror of a well-partied Deputy Prime Minister having the buttons of his shirt undone by his dancing partner, Ms Temple.
The images and details of his liaison with his divorced and engaged secretary will fast become public currency: he would summon her from her desk to his grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House so she could deliver something he had “forgotten”; he used to visit his office simply to chat to her; they concluded an office party by cuddling on the sofa; and that they flirted regularly in public, but Mr Prescott grew angry when they became a subject of office gossip. That will all become grist for a thousand jokes and inevitably colour the public view of the man who is, notionally, a heartbeat away from Downing Street.
He is, after all, the Labour Party’s and the Government’s official marriage guidance counsellor, seeking to placate the implacable hostilities between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
But it would perhaps be wrong to draw too many conclusions about Mr Prescott’s future. He has, after all, spent most of his life defying the odds. The young John Prescott could not be further removed from the menacing mien and appearance of petty vindictiveness that he presents today. Before that visit to the police station, what was arguably the seminal moment in his life had already occurred.
His 11-plus failure, aided by dyslexia of which his father was unaware, has been addressed with emotional eloquence by him: the bicycle promised in the event of exam success that never materialised; the love letter he sent to a girl at school to whom he had taken a shine which she returned with his spelling mistakes corrected.
Listen to him talk about such shattering events and it is impossible not to hear them still eating away at him five decades later. “I have to live with my lack of education daily in the way I string words together in the House of Commons.” His love of Billy Elliot, which he has seen five times and which moves him to tears, is born of recognising the travails of a misunderstood young boy.
The young John, leaving Ellesmere Port secondary modern at 15 without a qualification, was a shy boy, socially crippled by the hypersensitivity that school failure instilled, and signing up to serve on Cunard ships was an unlikely step. They could be rough places, manned by hard drinkers with a habit of preying on the less certain.
Mr Prescott came out fighting, His response to being bullied was to take up boxing — and so was born a metaphor that has served him through much of his political career. It was not until the 1994 leadership election campaign that he was unofficially christened “Thumper” opposite Mr Blair’s “Bambi”. But its aptness was never in doubt.
The stereotype of Prescott the politician is of the left-wing dinosaur elevated to the leadership ticket to balance the crusading zeal of Mr Blair.
It is true that Mr Prescott’s importance to the Prime Minister in enabling him to take the Labour Party to places it had previously never dreamt of is incalculable. But his personal political journey is more sophisticated, more interesting and more surprising.
He started on the hard Left as a Bennite. But he never joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for instance, unlike many in the Labour movement, because he did not believe its arguments withstood scrutiny.
He shared a flat in London with Dennis Skinner, but unlike his friend, he saw more to politics than chucking bottles from the backbenches. Some would regard this as ambition; others, a willingness to grapple with complex issues in search of practical solutions.
In the late 1980s, he was one of the first in Labour’s ranks to start pushing the idea of allowing the railways to raise private money for investment. Although Mr Blair gets the plaudits for telling Labour it had to end its support for the closed shop, Mr Prescott had reached the same conclusion.
There are seductive comparisons to be made between Mr Prescott and another working-class boy who rose to the heights of Deputy Prime Minister. George Brown, like Mr Prescott, had a sharp mind, a thin skin and a volatile temperament. But, partly because of his alcoholism, he deserted Harold Wilson’s Government in 1968.
A much less likely but far more apt comparison is with William Whitelaw, who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for her first two terms. Socially and stylistically, the working-class boy from Prestatyn and the tweed-clad peer could not have been further apart. But in their roles as counsellors — admittedly of different style — to strong-willed prime ministers miles ahead of their parties, they perform similar roles.
It is equally telling that Mr Prescott’s political hero is not Nye Bevan, the left-wing firebrand, but Ernest Bevin, the working-class boy who rose to become Clement Attlee’s Foreign Secretary in 1945.
Mr Prescott certainly possesses a short fuse. His left hook to Craig Evans after the blood sports enthusiast had pelted an egg into his face at close quarters was the defining image — in fact, the only image of the 2001 general election campaign. But he is equally capable of personal restraint, such as when he decided against hitting Danbert Nobacon, of Chumbawamba, who threw a bucket of ice over him at the Brit awards. His political legacy is mixed. He had enough influence to halt Mr Blair’s canoodling with Paddy Ashdown and the Liberal Democrats — The Project. His speech to the 1993 Labour conference supporting John Smith’s precarious one-member, one-vote reforms was unmatchable political drama and personal theatre. But his bold pledges to reduce car usage and chase the Holy Grail of an integrated transport policy have both fallen flat.
Mr Prescott loathes it when he dominates the news for the wrong reasons, and will doubtless be feeling doubly bad today. But whether it will change anyone’s mind about the man is unlikely. “John is John,” Mr Blair is wont to say.
Today, that phrase has an added dimension. But it continues to contain an essential truth.
WHAT HE SAID
From the Labour Party conference on October 4, 1996:
From The Guardian on April 12, 2006:
On the Greenpeace stunt in April last year:
“I feel very strongly about my wife being terrorised by people at 5am and 6am in the morning. “Wives shouldn’t be there for terrorising. I just think it’s a deplorable publicity stunt, particularly as I was one of the negotiators at [the global warming summit at] Kyoto. It was a terrifying incident for my wife in the early hours of the morning to see people scrambling up ladders on to the house. That’s just unacceptable."
“My point is that Pauline wouldn’t allow me to be a chauvinist, to treat her badly. She isn’t a doormat. It’s why she reacts badly to professional women who imagine women at home are servile”
