John Prescott, who has died aged 86, was Britain’s deputy prime minister to Tony Blair during his 10-year premiership and was instrumental in modernizing the Labor Party.
One of the party’s most authentically charismatic figures, Prescott was essential to the New Labor project.
Through his connections with his traditional support in the trade unions, he was trusted by precisely those elements who might have been suspicious of Blair, a London barrister, with no clear working-class roots or socialist roots. There are no beliefs.
After becoming deputy leader in 1994, Prescott sold New Labor to party traditionalists and his campaign played a significant role in Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 and his re-election in 2001 and 2005.
He acted as a mediator when Blair was barely on speaking terms with his chancellor, Gordon Brown, who had long-held ambitions for the leadership.
After he exchanged punches with a protester in North Wales during the 2001 election campaign, Blair stood by him and refused to fire him.
The episode, replayed by broadcasters in an era before viral internet clips, became an enduring image of Prescott in the public mind. After a stressed-out farmer threw an egg at him during a walkabout, the deputy prime minister turned and planted a left-handed jab in the man’s face, before the pair entered into an unusual scuffle.
Blair then laughed and said “John is John”.
In a 2010 interview, Prescott was asked what his legacy would be. “Well, they’ll start with punch, I imagine,” he said. “If someone was writing ‘John Prescott died today’ it would be a few things. I hope they would say he had his own view. He was a character in politics.
A man of great energy and passion who was twice accused of mutiny as a merchant mariner, Prescott combined a shrewd political mind with a short temper and an adventurous style.
MP for Hull East from 1970 to 2010, he was called “the mouth of the Humber” and was often mocked for his complex syntax – a result of his dyslexia. At the end of his greatest speech, at Labour’s 1993 conference on party reform, Matthew Paris of The Times wrote that he had “taken 15 rounds with the English tongue and found him slumped over the ropes, bleeding”.
But Prescott was also known for some outrageous one-liners, such as describing his Conservative leadership challenger Michael Heseltine as “the comma sutra of politics”. He has tried every position except No.10.
During the summer of the first Labor government in 1997, she attended a Thames Environment Agency photo call involving crabs. Mocking his Blairite colleague Peter Mandelson’s bid to win a seat on Labour’s national executive, he told reporters the creature was called Peter and asked if it would win the election.
John Leslie Prescott was born on 31 May 1938 in North Wales, the son of a railwayman and a labourer. He left school at 15 and became a “Hollywood waiter” on ocean liners. He got on particularly well with Sir Anthony Eden on the trips he took after resigning as Prime Minister in 1957.
While at sea he was often agitated. When the captain tried to fire him, the Mauritanian crew threatened to walk out. He was a key figure in the 1966 seamen’s strike, which Harold Wilson blamed for “disrupting the economy”. Union leaders forced him ashore and in 1970 he became an MP.
Although on the left, he stayed out of Labour’s civil war in the early 1980s, so was well suited to work with party leaders Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Blair to revive its fortunes.
For a large man with surprisingly vast political experience, Prescott had a deep streak of insecurity. He struggled in school, and was depressed when an early girlfriend returned a letter with the spelling corrected. It was only years later that he received a formal education with an economics degree at the Oxford College of Trade Unions and Hull University. In his 2008 autobiography, he revealed that he had struggled with bulimia for two decades.
He spent 27 years as an MP before reaching the Cabinet. During this time he led Labour’s delegation to the European Parliament, had four spells as transport spokesman and twice challenged for the deputy leadership.
Prescott’s pivotal role in Labour’s return to power was only guaranteed when his impassioned 1993 conference speech overcame trade union resistance to internal reforms demanded by then party leader Smith. When Smith died shortly afterwards, Prescott was the natural choice as Blair’s deputy. When he and Blair formed the “Dream Ticket” for the leadership, they were nicknamed “Bambi and Thumper”.
During his deputy premiership he wielded considerable power through the large Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) established for Prescott after Labour’s 1997 election landslide.
There were high hopes for his “integrated transport policy”, which banned the car and expanded public transport. But Blair’s aides undermined him for fear of alienating motorists, and a series of accidents on privatized railways dashed his hopes of expanding the network. However, he ensured the completion of London’s high-speed link with the Channel Tunnel – now known as High Speed One – after its promoters ran out of funds.
In London, he pushed ahead with plans for an elected mayor and promised elected assemblies for the English regions to match the devolved parliaments the Blair government had given to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But he couldn’t get voters on board, suffering a humiliating defeat in a referendum in north-east England where it was believed to have the most support.
By the 2001 election, DETR had proved too weak and Prescott moved into the Cabinet Office, retaining responsibility for regional devolution and ending the disastrous firemen’s strike on the government’s terms. In 2003 he reclaimed Transport and Local Government.
He supported Britain’s decision to invade Iraq alongside the US, but in 2016 – following the publication of the highly critical Chilcot Report on the conduct of the war – he concluded that Britain had breached international law. has broken He criticized Blair, to whom he had been staunchly loyal throughout his political career, for preventing his ministers from debating whether the war was legal.
He remained Labour’s kingmaker until his affair with a diary secretary hit the headlines in 2006, just before the disastrous round of local elections. Losing his portfolio, though not his deputy prime ministership, he was a lame duck for his final year in the ensuing reshuffle.
He was also embroiled in controversy for visiting the spectacular Colorado ranch of American billionaire Philip Anschutz, who was bidding to build a super casino in Britain.
Prescott himself was proud of his role in the creation of the 1997 Kyoto Convention on Global Warming. He worked hard to push it further, and was outraged when a deal he brokered was torpedoed by the French.
After resigning from the Commons in 2010, Prescott took a seat in the House of Lords and campaigned against climate change, human rights and phone-hacking of journalists. He also served as the UK’s lead representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights. He spoke only once in the chamber before leaving in July 2024 after suffering a stroke in 2019.
Prescott had many interests outside of politics. He was an accomplished scuba diver, jazz enthusiast and lover of vintage cars, nicknamed “Two Jags.” His insistence on being driven 200 yards from the hotel to a party conference “to save his wife’s hair” was influenced by his anti-motorcycle environment.
Prescott married Pauline Tilston, a former hairdresser, in 1961. They had two sons. She constantly supported him.
A message from his family said Prescott, who was living with Alzheimer’s, died “surrounded by the love of his family and the jazz music of Marian Montgomery.”
