In January I posed a question in The Sunday Times Magazine: what is John Prescott for? In the course of researching the article I was leaked internal documents that seemed to give the answer: less than nothing. Whitehall civil servants described his department as a “pantomime horse”, lacking in clarity and cohesion, schizophrenic, ill-managed and wasteful.
Political thinkers generally agreed, one adding that “he’s absolute crap at running a department, useless”. But they did argue that he did have at least three crucial roles within the Labour party: as a bridge between Blair and Brown, as the face of old Labour that would soothe the unions and as the voice of common sense, the man who could always say no.
The sheer ridiculous lack of decorum — public flirting and high jinks, the use of public property at Admiralty House and Dorneywood — of his affair with Tracey Temple, one of his own civil servants, certainly detonates the common sense justification. It also destroys any idea that he can continue to act as “honest broker” in the midst of the Blair-Brown axis. Why should either of them pay attention to a clown? Finally, as Patricia Hewitt learnt from her humiliation at the hands of the nurses last week, the unions have not been soothed by Prescott or by anybody else.
Oddly, however, Prescott has found one vital role that only he can play. Big shoes flapping, bow tie twirling, pants dropping and red nose glowing, he can distract our gaze from the horrors of the Home Office foreign prisoner scandal. New Labour can at least clutch at one positive achievement. It has found a proper job for John Prescott. Well, at least until Thursday — when the local elections pass their verdict on the success of the diversionary role played by Coco the deputy prime minister.
After that the even crueller light of history will be shone on this bizarre public career. What was Prescott, what was he all about? The historians will be forced to only one possible conclusion: class.
In power, educated, patrician Labour leaders seem to need a bit of rough to assure voters of their authenticity. Clement Attlee, an Oxford-educated lawyer, needed Ernest Bevin, like Prescott an under-educated union activist, but, unlike Prescott, a gifted and intelligent politician. Harold Wilson, again Oxford educated, needed George Brown who, exactly like Prescott, lurched his embarrassing way through politics.
Prescott has been the bit of rough to another Oxford lawyer. The bruiser used his unguided intelligence as a ship’s steward and party activist before softening his hard leftism to slip neatly into a new Labour suit while wearing the mask of old Labour commissar.
If Blair needed him, the cost to the rest of us was high. He was kept quiet with a series of bloated and utterly pointless ministries, constructed out of bits and pieces of other departments and all grandly celebrated as being under the control of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
The problem was that Prescott’s complete lack of management skills — a problem endemic in new Labour — and diplomatic finesse kept exposing the absurdity of his claim to be a real power in the land. His vast housing schemes, instead of taking into account new planning thought, looked like catastrophic old Labour council developments. He insulted plainly decent men like Lord Rogers and Lord Hunt, the first over planning, the second over Hunt’s refusal to support the Iraq war. Finally, his whole “Two Jags” delight in the trappings of power undermined both his claims to working class authenticity and his environmental credentials.
He seemed incapable of mastering a brief. This, combined with his chaotic way with the language, made him an easy figure of patrician disdain. The former British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, revealed that Prescott spoke of the “Balklands” and boasted of Harriers bombing from 15ft. Such sloppiness made it all too easy to be snooty about him. Unfair, you might say, but politics is all about not giving easy ammunition to enemies. Prescott seemed intent on providing the bullets and loading the guns.
What was really pernicious about all this was the betrayal of the very working class of which Prescott claimed to be the champion. He always needed apologising for. Blair just shrugged after the punch he threw in the 2001 election, implying that it was just what men like Prescott — ie working-class men — did. Such public affection as there was for the man was always founded upon a similar kind of shrug. He’s just so raw, what do you expect? There was nothing raw about Jim Callaghan, John Major or Bevin, all working-class boys. They understood the limitations of their backgrounds and worked hard to overcome them. They were no less authentic for that, rather they celebrated aspiration. Prescott seems to find authenticity in wallowing in his limitations as if they represent some kind of earthy common sense, as if knowing your roots means knowing nothing else.
He has become, therefore, a regressive force in British society, a throwback to, as one political thinker put it to me, “a Fifties black and white movie where the main characters are chippy, inarticulate trade unionists and suave chinless wonders”. He reinforced class stereotypes, embedding old, bitter and futile divisions in the heart of the new Labour project.
The grotesqueries of his affair and its exposure are merely the climax of this process. Politicians will have affairs; the psychobabble about the aphrodisiac of power is all too obviously true. We shouldn’t care and I certainly don’t; but Prescott seems to have conducted his fling with all the crass insensitivity that he brought to his politics. Those photographs, the flaunting of the relationship and the use both of public servants and public buildings are indicative of a man who persisted in believing his position gave him special privileges and special immunities that made ordinary, elementary discretion unnecessary.
It is absurd that the sex lives of politicians matter so much in this puritanical, uptight, censorious and inhibited society. But it is tragic that, in the case of Prescott, they have become one more way in which old, cruel divisions have been resurrected and reinforced. In its last, decadent phase, new Labour has become the party of the class war, not least through the cartoon caperings of their own proletarian puppet, John Leslie Prescott.
