In March 2000, I saw a very different side of him
“There was no one quite like him in British politics.” Tony Blair said it first, and with the most authority. Alastair Campbell echoed the former prime minister’s tribute to
Prescott went ballistic. As in, properly tonto. I was having Sunday lunch at my mother-in-law’s house, and my phone rang. I left the table to take the call, telling everyone to continue with lunch. It was Prescott, who was furious that the inference from the picture was that he, too, was colluding in the misuse of public funds. No amount of my placating him, trying to explain the news value of the photograph, made a difference.
He didn’t really care what people said about him after the infamous punch, or about his mangling of the English language, but he was an ineffably proud man who, for all the “Two Jags”, “champagne socialist” sobriquets that were hurled at him, and notwithstanding his seat in the Lords, cared deeply that he was seen primarily as a man who was true to his roots, and to the proprieties of his job.
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