John Prescott heaved his bulk into the saddle and rode off to play cowboy. Stretching before him one Saturday in July last year was the “big country” of sage plains and distant mountains: he was in Colorado as a guest of an American tycoon.

After arriving for dinner the night before, the deputy prime minister had decided to do the Clint Eastwood thing. “He wanted to go riding,” said a source familiar with the trip. “He’s always wanted to get on a horse and round up cows.”

Prescott was in the right place. He was staying at the Eagle’s Nest, a large chunk of modern Wild West owned by Philip Anschutz, a reclusive billionaire. His estate includes cattle ranching, skeet shooting, a golf course, an old stagecoach post, neatly restored, and a stable block where horses are tended by traditional wranglers who speak with cowpoke bluntness.

“This is a small community and he [Anschutz] may be as rich as Jesus but he is not much of anything else,” said one wrangler on the ranch last week. “He doesn’t overpay much and he does not talk to anyone much.”

The billionaire is barely known by the locals. He has a mansion secluded by trees, while a collection of “cottages” a mile away provides enough guest accommodation, according to another witness, “to sleep the entire Los Angeles Kings ice hockey team”.

The guest homes are surrounded by lakes, oaks and willows. Nearby is a collection of old locomotives and railway carriages. Anschutz made his first fortune in oil, but moved on to railways and later diversified into sport and entertainment. He’s the 89th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

He is far from a natural buddy for an old Labour slugger like Prescott. Yet here was the deputy prime minister, happy to enjoy Anschutz’s hospitality.

Two days afterwards Wyatt Twerp (as the deputy prime minister was unkindly dubbed later) travelled to Los Angeles where he attended a drinks reception hosted by one of Anschutz’s key lieutenants.

What on earth brought these very different men together? On the face of it they had little in common — yet Prescott had met Anschutz seven times. Last week the deputy prime minister was due to meet the billionaire again — the meeting was only cancelled because a furore had erupted over allegations of sleaze and improper influence.

But who has been doing favours for whom? What is really at stake? And why have the two men met so often? Last week Prescott gave garbled, contradictory explanations. Rumours about his private life added to the disarray. He refused to deny that he had had other affairs in addition to the one with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary.

Amid the chaos, the real answers to the Anschutz gamble are only now becoming clear. And they show that Tony Blair and Prescott have long been keen to do the American’s bidding — because they need him and his money more than he needs them.

THE entanglement of the billionaire and the deputy prime minister revolves around the Millennium Dome, in which Anschutz has a key stake and in which Prescott has played a pivotal, if unsung, role.

It was Prescott who was sent to bash heads together and find a buyer for the dome when the bankrupt structure was threatened with demolition after its closure at the end of 2000.

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