RIP John Prescott

[DotCommunist]

a point I've read- its easy to see where blairism and its pale successors have failed, another reckoning is the failure of the prescott's too. A more difficult question perhaps but their inability to hold the line on social democratic values is its own part of where things are today. Made me think a bit inamongst my desire to pour some out for one of the old school and enjoy the glory day vids of him punching a hunt supporter.

 

[freshapple]

I was once at a party where I ended up talking simultaneously to the woman I lost my virginity to [edit - many years earlier rather than that night] and John Prescott. Felt like one of those weird dreams but actually happened.

A weird dream would have been losing your virginity to John Prescott tbh

 

[nogojones]

Ah shit. I've already put a tenner on him to win the next Jake Paul fight.

And fuck him. His hands were drenched in blood.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

That’s was undoubtedly how Blair and Co used him and he was savvy and clever enough to know it and yet went along with it. A ‘history of facing both ways’ is a good way of putting it actually.

But like Rayner now, the snark, open snobbery and class hatred (often from their ‘own side’) they provoke makes me instinctively side with them.

Was he savvy and clever about it, though? Or was he seduced by the empty glory of the title of Deputy PM? He was an enabler, playing a similar role to the one Clegg would play for Cameron. (I would argue that Clegg was similarly seduced to give up any real power in return for the empty glory of the position.) And yeah, backed the Iraq War, as ska says, which is one he can't take back. A war enabler. Hard to get past that.

 

[CNT36]

A weird dream would have been losing your virginity to John Prescott tbh

I'm staying awake tonight.

 

[BigMoaner]

Time gentlemen

Yes my selector

 

[Whagwan]

At least he openly regretted Iraq, which is more than anyone else involved.

 

[gosub]

Jaguars rebrand really is going badly.



RIP

 

[Cloo]

One of my brother' first gigs as a civil servant was assisting and speech writing for Prescott. According to him, what you saw was very much what you go with Prescott. He did not adjust well to things not going to plan and would 'f and blind and throw things' when not happy, but at the same time my brother said he preferred working for him than some stitched-up stiff-upper-lip type

 

[littlebabyjesus]

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At least he openly regretted Iraq, which is more than anyone else involved.

Fair dos. I didn't know he had said that.

 

[rasputin]

I remember he was the government minister who confronted the Fire Brigades Union during the dispute of 2002-3. Eventually the government conceded a 16% pay rise.

I also seem to remember some embarrassing headlines involving antics with his diary secretary.

And his comment about the "plates shifting" around the time Brown was pressuring Blair to step down. Everyone thought he meant Tectonic plates when in fact he meant actual plates on a ship in heavy seas. It prompted sneers from Tories and the media that he was "the only minister with a job title bigger than his vocabulary". Nice. Not.

At the end of the day Gordon Brown is, I think, not far off the mark when he says:

You’ve got to look at his achievements. He was probably the first government minister to see the importance of the environment. Kyoto, that environmental treaty in 1997, you’ve got to attribute that to John’s hard work with Al Gore.

Then he saw the importance, and he was a pioneer of regional policy. So the fact we have devolution and mayors owes a great deal to what John was thinking right throughout the 1980s and 90s when I was working with him.

And then we mustn’t forget that one of the great achievements of John as environment secretary was the repair and improvement of housing, 1.5m houses which would not have been repaired without John’s determination that the social housing stock had to be remodernised.

So you’ve got to look at the practical achievements of someone who possibly surprised himself by the way that he managed to become deputy prime minister, but actually made a huge difference.

 

[Lord Camomile]

I'm sorry, but this did raise a bit of a smirk




Hard to argue with the former, but also hard to argue that he at least came across a bit better than his contemporaries.

I, too, also hadn't realised quite how old he was (I now measure these things in how close they are to my parents' age ).