Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott dies aged 86

Chris Mason
Political editor

“The completely unique Prescott blend of charm and brutality – made always more effective by the unpredictability of which would be
predominant – got you through the decade.”

So wrote Tony Blair in a private
letter to John Prescott in the days after leaving Downing Street as Prime
Minister in 2007.

Sir Tony later wrote in his memoirs: “He could be maddening,
he could be dangerous, he could be absurd, he could be magnificent,” never
“dull, placid, uneventful…forgettable”.

Amid the slick, middle class polish of
New Labour, John Prescott personified a blunt grit; proudly working class,
proud of his trades union background, proud to bind his party’s past with its
present.

From a seafaring waiter as a young man, he was, via the European
Parliament and much later the House of Lords, to become the country’s longest
serving Deputy Prime Minister.