Former Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. File
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

John Prescott was a merchant seaman who dropped out of school but thrived in politics by bringing working-class credibility to the modernising Government of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as his Deputy.

Mr. Prescott, who died on Wednesday (November 20, 2024) aged 86, had a colourful five-decade career in British politics, becoming one of his most recognisable figures.

His heyday came during his 1997-2007 spell as Deputy Prime Minister in a Blair Government that returned a rebooted version of Labour to power at the height of the “Cool Britannia” craze.

Mr. Blair had abandoned much of Labour’s socialist dogma and depended on Mr. Prescott to shore up the financial and political backing the party traditionally received from trade unions.

“We are all middle class now,” Mr. Prescott said weeks before Labour claimed the first of an unprecedented three successive general election victories.

But he might be remembered best as the man whose short fuse and verbal slip-ups made “Prezza” a mainstay of the tabloids — and the butt of Conservative rivals’ jokes.

“John is John,” Mr. Blair said after Prescott punched a protester angered at Labour’s move to ban fox-hunting threw an egg at him during the 2001 general election campaign.

The images were beamed around the world and Prescott later joked that he had told Mr. Blair: “You told us to connect with the electorate, so I did.”

But his instinctive left jab, far from causing an outcry seemed only to endear him further to the public after he pleaded self-defence.

Mr. Prescott was the son of a railway worker and a maid who failed his first set of secondary school exams and dropped out at the age of 15.

He ended up working as a steward on an ocean liner and was ridiculed years later in parliament by a political rival’s taunt of “mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni”.

One biographer said this moment engendered a visceral hatred in Mr. Prescott for the Conservative party that turned the amateur boxer into an even more combative political force.

Mr. Prescott’s plain-spoken union activist’s ethos proved vital to Blair as he shifted the party from the left toward the election-winning centre ground.

Mr. Blair said the contrast between him and the party’s number two could not have been greater. But he also valued Prescott as a loyal defender whom “you could count on” in a tight spot.

The young premier rewarded Mr. Prescott by handing him a sprawling series of ministries that were soon dubbed the “Magic Kingdom” by the press.

He played a major role in securing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

But his main role may have been one of constant mediation between Mr. Blair and his more leftist finance minister — and eventual successor — Gordon Brown.

Mr. Prescott’s importance to the uneasy Blair-Brown partnership helped him survive a range of scandals and blunders that might have sunk others’ careers.

Mr. Prescott was dubbed “Two Jags” in the tabloid press for getting a chauffeur-driven government limousine in addition to his own Jaguar sedan — a perk that naysayers said discredited his green cause credentials.

That nickname morphed into “Two Jabs” after the 2001 brawl in north Wales that became known as “The Rumble in Rhyl”.

Mr. Prescott preferred using faxes to email and once compared public relations spin doctors who hung around Downing Street to “gnats on an elephant’s backside”.

He also repeatedly flubbed his lines — his mangled English becoming the stuff of legend among political sketch writers.

Many were left scratching their heads after Mr. Prescott told parliament in 2004 that the only solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was to “walk the table”.

He also displayed an acute awareness of Mr. Britons’ perception of his outsized persona.

“When I do die, after 50 years in politics, all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales,” he told The Guardian newspaper in early 2019.

And he felt no regrets.

“Politics has allowed my personality, my aggression, my passion, to play a full part,” Mr. Prescott said.

London:

Britain’s former deputy prime minister John Prescott, who served under Tony Blair and with him helped transform the country’s Labour party, has died aged 86, his family said on Thursday.

“We are deeply saddened to inform you that our beloved husband, father and grandfather, John Prescott, passed away yesterday (Wednesday) at the age of 86,” a statement read.

Blair, the privately educated lawyer who appointed working-class Prescott to help appease the Labour left as he moved the party to the centre ground, said he was “devastated” at Prescott’s death.

“There was no one quite like him in British politics,” he told BBC radio.

Keir Starmer, who became Labour’s first prime minister since 2010 after a landslide general election win in July, called Prescott “a true giant of the Labour movement”.

“He was a staunch defender of working people and a proud trade unionist. During a decade as deputy prime minister, he was one of the key architects of a Labour government that transformed the lives of millions of people across the nation,” he added.

“So much of John’s work set the path for those of us fortunate enough to follow. From leading climate negotiations to fighting regional inequality, his legacy will live on well beyond his lifetime.”

Prescott, a former merchant seaman and trade union activist who served as a member of parliament for Hull in northern England for four decades, died “peacefully” at a care home, his wife Pauline, and two sons said.

“He did so surrounded by the love of his family and the jazz music of Marian Montgomery,” they added.

Prescott, who was appointed to the House of Lords, suffered a stroke in 2019 and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s. He stopped being a member of the upper chamber of parliament in July because of his health problems.

Plain-speaking, Prescott served for 10 years as Blair’s deputy following Labour’s landslide 1997 general election win. During a campaign stop in north Wales he punched a protester who threw an egg at him.

But he also acted as a mediator between Blair and his finance minister Gordon Brown, who also helmed the transformation of Labour in the 1990s and who had designs on power.

Prescott’s brief included the environment and transport, as well as leading negotiations for Britain for the international Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Blair said in a 2007 letter to Prescott that he saw his role as “smoothing out colleagues and sorting out colleagues and trouble-shooting”.

“The completely unique Prescott blend of charm and brutality… got you through the decade, kept the government together and above all, gave me a lot of fun. I was lucky to have you as my deputy,” he told him.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)