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John Prescott’s failed class war He was the ultimate champagne socialist

'Prescott always wanted power.' Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

'Prescott always wanted power.' Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images


November 23, 2024   4 mins

“He’s top class and I’m bottom class,” recalled the late John Prescott of his time serving the drinks to Sir Anthony Eden as a steward on the MV Rangitata. On doctor’s orders, Eden and his wife had embarked on a cruise to New Zealand, a mere nine days after his post-Suez resignation in January 1957.

In later life, wags would joke that Prezza had once “worked for Cunard … and he still works pretty hard to this day”, but his early seafaring career connects us to an increasingly distant past, where a life at sea was still a fairly typical career choice for British young men with a taste for adventure.

During that six-week voyage, Eden had presented Prescott with bottles of beer for his prowess in the ship’s boxing ring, and Prescott would go on to describe Eden as an “old Tory gent” for his courtesy and good manners (although he was less keen on the snobbish Lady Eden). Yet the 18-year-old firebrand still considered the former Conservative Prime Minister a class enemy.

At sea, Prescott’s union bosses considered him a troublemaker, and a sense of social inadequacy gnawed at him throughout his life. This was sharpened by his educational experiences, first by failing the 11-plus (a source of trauma for so many of his generation); then the embarrassment of unacknowledged dyslexia during his time at Ruskin College; and when a middle class student at Hull University said he belonged to the “lumpen proletariat”, he only realised later that he’d been insulted.

His whole career was a sort of revenge for these humiliations, and the taunts in the Commons chamber from patricians such as Nicholas Soames — “mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni, and would you ask my friend what he’s having?” — left Prescott with a seething hatred of the Tories, and a steely commitment to ousting them from the government benches.

This is why Prescott and his one-time flatmate Dennis Skinner (another Ruskin alumnus) parted company; for Prescott’s hero was Ernie Bevin, Attlee’s hard-headed right-hand man. Thus, Prescott rallied to support John Smith over “one member, one vote” in 1993, and then backed Tony Blair over the demise of “Clause IV”, that explicitly socialist commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, that was perceived by party reformers as a drag on Labour’s electability. For just like Bevin, Prescott always wanted power.

“For just like Bevin, Prescott always wanted power.”

But in the public imagination, his political skills were perhaps under-appreciated (although not by those who worked with him), and it was his human qualities that made him so attractive as a public figure. Yes, he mangled his words, “the green belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it”‘, or after a rough flight “it’s great to be back on terra cotta”, but that was part of his unrehearsed charm.

To some he was that recognisable type, the bolshie shop steward or the barrack-room lawyer with a combustible temper — but he was also a champagne socialist in the very best sense of “nothing being too good for the workers”. In the Seventies, the NUM leader Joe Gormley had said that he looked forward to a time when every miner “could afford a Rolls Royce in the driveway and a Mini for the wife to go shopping in”, although not many achieved that dream. So though Prescott may have been mocked for his “two Jags” and his enormous mock Tudor house on leafy Saltshouse Road in Hull, with its battlements and gargoyles (known locally as “Prescott Towers”), and for his junkets to the Maldives and croquet on the lawn at Dorneywood, he and his glamorous Liz Taylor-esque wife Pauline, blow-dried to within an inch of her life, lived out the aspirations of so many working class families. At a certain level, you just had to respect the hustle.

Although Oliver Cromwell may have been one of his political heroes, Prescott was no puritan — “never knowingly under-lunched” in the lingo of the Westminster lobby, and only the truly gifted could open their “clack” (as the throat is known in parts of the North) and neck a pint in under five seconds like Prescott could. He had an authenticity, too, and so many of the tributes to him since his death have noted his kindness and consideration, especially to ordinary people, or how he spoke up for those overlooked places in the North unvisited by prosperity.

Here was a man who could literally walk with kings and never lose the common touch — although the future Charles III was perturbed by his habit in meetings with him of sliding down the seat with his legs apart “his crotch pointing a little menacingly” and balancing his teacup and saucer on his paunch.

It’s depressing that an unabashed working-class figure like Prescott is still treated as a curiosity and a stage Northerner, and says a lot about how little has changed since he entered politics. When he first stood for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, in 1988, around a third of Labour MPs came from working-class jobs, but the proportion has now dropped to just 13%. Little wonder so many politicians struggle to connect with the electorate, as Prezza did so literally.

Throughout the Labour Party’s history, the middle-class and working-class elements of what is still cringingly referred to at moments like these as the Labour movement, were held together in an uneasy alliance. The Labour historian Kenneth O. Morgan noted that although the party was “mostly led by middle class professionals, from the Webbs to the Blairs, [Prescott] was the token proletarian on Labour’s front bench in the grand old tradition of Jimmy Thomas, Ernie Bevin, and George Brown” – and, latterly, we might add, Angela Rayner.

But, ironically, Prescott’s hard-headed devotion to the New Labour project led directly to the final victory of the bourgeois strain in Labour, and the complete dominance of a New Establishment — drawn from the hauts-fonctionnaires of the BBC, universities and public sector — who can be just as snooty and out of touch as the Old Establishment that he first encountered on the deck of the Rangitata.


Dan Jackson is the author of the best-selling book The Northumbrians: The North East of England and its People. A New History, published by Hurst (2019)

 

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Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
15 days ago

Captain James RN FRS .
James Cook – Wikipedia
George Stephenson invented railways
George Stephenson – Wikipedia
Thomas Telford FRS, a brilliant engineer. .
Thomas Telford – Wikipedia
All three were born into poverty and through hard work over many years became great and they lacked Prescott’s chip on the shoulder. . Prescott was a good steward.
Prescott went to sea when many of the officers had served in convoys in WW2. The Merchant Navy had a death rate of one third, the highest of any Allied Service. Prescott probably felt inferior to officers who had led men into combat as teenagers. Many officers started as cadets at the age of sixteen years of age.
Compare Prescott with Captain Mason GC
Dudley Mason – Wikipedia
Compare Prescott with the captains of the ships on Operation Pedestal.
World War II: Operation Pedestal-Malta (Full Documentary)

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago

I’m sorry but he was a very unpleasant man

Mr Brien
Mr Brien
15 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

You’re absolutely right. John Prescott had all the charm of a grumpy bulldog with a chip on its shoulder. His entire public persona seemed to oscillate between barely concealed disdain and outright hostility.
He was infamous for his temper tantrums and constant sniping, especially when he felt his precious role as Labour’s working-class mascot wasn’t getting the respect he thought it deserved.
Then there’s his hypocrisy. He loved to lecture others about moral high ground and Labour values while indulging in every perk of office he could get his hands on. From his luxury cars to his grace-and-favour mansion, he seemed more interested in enjoying the trappings of power than actually using it to make a difference.
So no, you don’t need to apologise for calling him unpleasant. For someone who claimed to represent the everyman, he sure had a funny way of showing he cared about anyone other than himself.

rchrd 3007
rchrd 3007
15 days ago

Wasn’t one of his plans to do with the demolition of hundreds of thousands of houses rather than renovate them

Mr Brien
Mr Brien
15 days ago
Reply to  rchrd 3007

Yes, Prescott’s brilliant masterstroke of “urban regeneration” involved bulldozing perfectly good homes instead of renovating them. What a legacy! The plan was supposed to “modernise” housing in northern England, but what it really did was destroy entire communities while wasting billions in taxpayer money. Renovation? Nah, that would’ve been too sensible. Instead, Prescott’s team decided to swing the wrecking ball like it was going out of style.
The worst part? Many of these homes were fully repairable, but Prescott’s team deemed them “unfit for purpose” based on arbitrary standards. Meanwhile, families were forced out, neighbourhoods were gutted, and the promised redevelopment often failed to materialise. Some of the land sat empty for years, a literal monument to Prescott’s inability to think beyond demolishing everything in sight.
But it wasn’t his house getting knocked down, so why would he care? And Prescott sold this disaster as a way to “transform” the North. Well, it did transform things, just not in the way anyone wanted. Instead of rebuilding communities, it deepened mistrust in politicians who claim to know what’s best while wrecking people’s lives. Bravo, John. Truly a man of the people.