Prescott the Boor
Dail Mail 30.03.2006
Quentin Letts.
Sometimes you look at past political figures and wonder how they lasted so long.
How did the country put up with George Brown as such a drunken Foreign
Secretary? How did anyone ever Jeffrey Archer was a proper person for a peerage?
Why did it take so long for "opinion" to see through such men?
In coming years, people will express amazement that the Prescott joke continued
so long. They will be astonished that in a developed country such an ignorant,
unpleasant, embarrassingly untalented man was Deputy Prime Minister for nine
years.
Yesterday, Mr Prescott took PMQs. Tony Blair was abroad, even though Parliament
does not break up for Easter until today.
Often I have described how the Commons braces itself for the first moments of a
Prescott performance, for the slurry spreader's opening, airborne salvos of
verbal manure. I recall reporting the anxious faces of Hansard stenographers,
the clerks crouching in their wigs, the O-shaped bafflement that falls over the
galleries.
It was not much different yesterday, save that this time your sketchwriter's
merriment failed him. Oh, plenty of others laughed. At times it seemed the
entire Chamber was cackling as Mr Prescott locked combat with William Hague and
the Lib Dems' David Heath. Ha ha ha! Jousting cries flew here and there, all to
great acclaim. But I found myself listening to all this as though through a
gauze of ether-soaked muslin.
In my mind's eye the action was taking place in slow motion, outside my cocoon
of sudden, weary, abject shame that our political estate has fallen so low.
For the record, Mr Hague asked about pensioners. Mr Prescott's answer was so
inept that it was literally beyond comprehension. The Commons cheered. Mr Hague
suggested that, "there was so little English in that answer President Chirac
would have been happy with it". Ha ha ha!
For the record, it took Mr Prescott six minutes to use the phrase "18 years of
Tory rule". For the record, he also defended his bad English, blaming his
education (he in fact took a
DipEcon/ Pol from Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1965). He said he would sooner get
his 'words wrong' than make some of Mr Hague's past "mistakes of judgment".
Again, raucousness all round.
Mr Heath asked about council tax. Mr Prescott did not engage seriously in the
argument, but abused the decent Mr Heath desire to be the Lib Dems' deputy
leader. Biff! Wham! Ha ha! Get in the political dig! Screw the public!
Serious questions followed, about political corruption, post offices, Government
grants to political parties, motor neurone disease, teachers' salaries, a
"Chinese heroin baron" linked to the Tories, the Prime Ministership, flood
defences, hospital baby units. So far as I could discern amid all the hyena
laughter, only two of these issues were treated with much seriousness by Mr
Prescott.
Poshing up his voice in mockery, he attacked Mr Hague for his teenage speech to
a Tory conference in the 1970s. Face twisting, he took an envious swipe at Mr
Hague's 'great personal prosperity' and produced some soundbite about Punch and
Judy.
Mr Hague could easily have retorted with a question about the many thousands of
pounds Mr Prescott has claimed off the state in "expenses".
Maybe he should have done. Instead, he just joined in the gaiety, swept up in
the mood of self-indulgence, unable to sense, down there in the stinking well of
Westminster, the empty despair so many people feel about our politics and the
parties we are now to be asked to give millions of pounds.
"Well done, John!" shouted friends as Mr Prescott swaggered off at the end,
adrenalin firing his eyes. Lobby reporters assured me, "you've got plenty of
cracking material there!" Runner boys surfed past on excited, received wisdom
that this had been a classic encounter, a "win for Prezza".
There was a loser, yesterday, but it was not Mr Hague, or Mr Heath, or even the
feckless, scandalous figure of John Prescott. It was British public life.