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Edinburgh Fringe 2016

John Prescott – In Conversation

Media Series At The Fringe

Genre: Political, Spoken Word

Venue: University of Edinburgh Business School

Festival:


Low Down

One of the last real characters in politics with a deep sense of loyalty to the people that he continues to serve as a working member of the House of Lords, Prescott really is a politician with a difference. And all the better for it.

Review

John (now Lord) Prescott is one of the best known and certainly one of the most formidable politicians to have graced our legislatures over the last half century. He was Deputy Prime Minister for a record ten years as part of the Blair dynasty that swept Labour back into power in 1997 and sustained the party through three successive election victories.

Prescott seemed to float above that infamous Blair-Brown rivalry, acting as confidant to both and peace broker to them and many others as the self-styled “people’s party” somehow managed to sustain at least the appearance of unity in power, a stark contrast to the troubled times in which it now finds itself in with its embattled leader having, only this week, to fight off “Traingate”, the latest in a series of gaffes that have hounded Corbyn since he took office.

A passionate orator and negotiator, Prescott warmed to interviewer Chris Carter’s gentle probing before the packed auditorium at the University of Edinburgh Business School. Compared to battling with the likes of Paxman and Humphreys, this must have seemed like a walk in the park, but Carter’s disarming approach has the habit of relaxing interviewees and it certainly did the trick here, releasing a stream of enlightening and amusing anecdotes in a torrent of words, with his trademark mangled syntax often drawing out the pertinence of his remarks. Indeed, so famous was Lord Prescott for mangling the odd sentence that Hansard transcribers regularly (and accurately) recorded what they assumed he had meant, rather than what he actually uttered in the white heat of debate in the bear pit that is the House of Commons.

Marvellously self-deprecating and with a wonderful sense of comic timing to add to his dead-pan delivery, Prescott was at his best when relating the tale of “that punch” when he had what he described to us as “a disagreement” with a protestor who’d been put up by Sky TV to throw an egg at him during a walk-about in the 2001 election campaign.

To gales of laughter, he pointed out that the spot in Rhyl where his left jab caught his victim completely off guard is now commemorated with a plaque. Now, one wonders what would have happened if Prescott, a boxer in his younger days, had struck out with his stronger right hand? A victim in hospital rather than with a bruised ego and jaw might have precipitated more than an amused “John is John” comment from Blair and with a different Deputy Prime Minister in place, would Blair have been able to garner sufficient Labour votes to have gone to war in Iraq?

And on the subject of Iraq, Prescott demonstrates (as if it were needed) that he was no “yes man”, never more so than in his open criticism of Blair’s contempt for the concept of Cabinet Government. Yet he remains essentially a pragmatist as a politician and an evident team player with a passionate belief in what the Labour Party stands for.

One of the last real characters in politics with a deep sense of loyalty to the people that he continues to serve as a working member of the House of Lords, Prescott really is a politician with a difference. And all the better for it.

 

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