Tony Blair said this morning that he felt “devastated” by the death of John Prescott, his deputy when he was prime minister. And no wonder. Prescott was, he observed, the “yin to his yang”, or possibly the other way round, someone from a less privileged background from him, a different aspect of the Labour Party. And that’s precisely why his death feels like the demise of real Old Labour, the working class part of it.
I knew John Prescott a little: lunch at Westminster, chats at the Irish Embassy or the Labour conference. He was pleasant, affable, humorous, in my experience. I took him to task for saying at the start of the New Labour venture that he wouldn’t talk to Tories. Why not? I demanded. “I don’t like Tories,” he said unanswerably. He softened over time, but some Tories did poke him with sticks, like the ones who’d loudly ask him to fetch the drinks on account of him having been a steward on a Cunard liner (miraculously, he never punched them).
One of the things that struck me was that, like the other Old Labour stalwart, Barbara Castle, he was always smartly turned out in a suit and tie; not for him the louche outfits of a more laid-back generation. “I was always brought up to dress smartly”, he said. It showed respect. Pauline, his delightful hairdresser wife, made sure that he always looked the part. Although he came from a solid trade union background, he was the product of the respectable working class, people who got married, were turned out nicely and kept down a proper job.
He was a product of the aspirational working class
He was also a product of the aspirational working class, those who tried to better themselves; famously, he failed the eleven-plus. He went to Ruskin College, Oxford in 1962 where he got a degree in politics and economics: he was exactly the kind of student that the college was established for, coming from a working-class background, the kind who wouldn’t have found it easy to obtain a place at Oxford conventionally. Ruskin (according to its critics) doesn’t really have that function anymore. He later studied economics at Hull University.
So although his father was classic Labour, being a railway signalman, and his mother came from a mining family, he sought to pull himself up through education; a generation or two earlier, he would have educated himself at one of the Working Men’s Institutes. In this, he resembles no one so much as Neil Kinnock, son of a coal miner, who similarly educated himself out of his background.
The contemporary equivalent of Prescott is Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister to another lawyer with her own uncompromisingly non-establishment accent. But the differences are as striking as the similarities and not just because Prescott would have been unlikely to have accepted suits from Lord Alli. John Prescott was a merchant seaman, a job that is nowadays often occupied by workers from abroad; Angela dropped out of school at 16 when she got pregnant and became a care worker for the local council in Stockport. That suggests how Labour has changed; the party of the working class has become the party of the public sector.
The Labour market has changed
When you look at the Starmer cabinet, there are vanishingly few people from an Old Labour background; council and public sector workers are the norm; ditto those working in education. And it shows how the labour market has changed. If you wanted to get someone like Prescott into parliament now, you’d look for someone like Mick Lynch, head of the RMT union, who shows no sign of entering parliamentary politics. His initial backer, remember, was John Smith, the devoutly Christian, old-school Labour politician, who used the old trade unionist Prescott to get the unions on side in the reform of the Labour Party.
Prescott played up to his gruff persona; you got the impression that he enjoyed ruffling the sensibilities of the Establishment, and there were indeed many who came over queasy at the notion of him representing Britain on important missions abroad. But some of the criticism directed at him was misplaced; he was, for instance, criticised for being seen to play croquet with his staff at Dorneywood … but why, you ask yourself, was it somehow non-working class to play croquet, a game which, in its viciousness, could practically have been invented for politicians? Good for him, I reflected.
A more telling lapse was his affair with his former secretary, Tracey Temple, which suggested that he had changed from the man who married nice, beautifully coiffed Pauline (his excuse for taking a Jaguar about 200 yards at the Labour conference was that he didn’t want to ruffle Pauline’s hair). She had the last laugh. When the affair emerged, she made clear that she’d be exacting quite a few favours in return for standing by him.
Looking at the present Labour cabinet, you feel the want of a Prescott. None of them represents Old Labour, in the social rather than the political sense. He was the Spirit of Labour Past; Labour Present is a more diminished entity.
