Singular life
I want a dictator
Petronella Wyatt
Iused to like John Prescott — sort of. He seemed a jolly kind of chap. Once, a few years ago, when the Tories were still in office, we sang a duet together on top of the Post Office Tower. The occasion was the launch of the All-Parliamentary Party Jazz Group. John sang 'Mean To Me'. Bill Cash played the cymbals. Need I say more.
After that, my encounters with Pestered John — as he was becoming — were limit- ed to the annual Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch at the Savoy. There, once in his cups, his smile would gradually sink below the surface of his features. He would complain of his disrespectful treatment by Blair and of Peter Mandelson's attempts to teach him grammatical English. I am breaking no confidences here, as the gist of our conversation has already been reported in a Sunday newspaper.
At that point in time, poor Prescott made Blair look about as appealing as the manager of a dodgy massage parlour exploiting innocent flesh. Here, evidently, was an honest working-class man whose misfortune of birth had led to his being persecuted by a public school boy — no, I don't mean Nicholas Soames. English fair play decreed that a thousand (better- formed) words should rise from their key- boards in his defence.
The general purport of all this was in Prescott's favour. But, after being elevated to high office, something that should have blown away these dyspeptic cobwebs, it began to seem that Prescott bore more and more of a resemblance to the late Princess of Wales. He showed signs of being in the advanced stages of self-pity. The kind of ill- treatment of which he complained — ostracism, persecution, etc. — did, undoubtedly, sometimes exist. What in the end aroused the hearer's suspicions was the multiplicity of villains whom it had been his ill-fortune to meet with. If one person in a given environment receives, according to their own account, universal ill-treatment, the likelihood is that the cause lies in the person, and that they either imagine injuries, or behave in such a way as to arouse unconscious irritation.
In other words, if so many people made sport of John Prescott they must have had a good reason. After all, there's no joke without ire. Perhaps, his vituperative obstreperousness did not hide a heart of gold, as the cliché went, it merely con- cealed more vituperative obstreperousness. You noticed how, like a dangerous dog, Prescott had the habit of drawing his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retracting his chin as far as possible, all the while dilating his eyes and nostrils.
And now his performance at the world climate summit. Out he storms like a poor man's Hezza and splutters to the waiting cameras that he is 'gutted'. Gutted! How very Talleyrand! You can just imagine the old boy at the Congress of Vienna after the French envoy had been un peu difficile. Tal- leyrand, of course, was the French envoy, but anyway. `Je suis gutted!': the cry of noble statesmen down the ages. Cardinal Richelieu said it all the time, I bet.
The more you think about it, however, the more you think the Great Prescott Dis- aster Movie is part of the Blairite plot. It goes like this. We all know that Blair has pretensions to be head of state; to be viewed as a sort of enlightened despot. He has already held up two plump fingers to Parliament, making his announcements through the press, the medium used by all embryonic dictatorships. But to move a stage further towards his dream, what does Blair have to do? He must discredit democ- racy itself. No mean feat, you might say. Ordinarily, yes. But this is no ordinary situ- ation. We must reckon, you see, with Mr Prescott.
Democracy, as Bernard Shaw argued, is best preserved by those of relatively refined mien, who refrain from ranting and raving and feeling gutted. Their air of calm assur- ance leads people to believe that the ballot box is not yet fit for match-wood. Even the toffish-style figure seems to engender more faith in universal suffrage, hence the gener- al approbation of diffident politicians like Douglas Hurd. Their tempers, doubtless, have been rendered more pliant and mal- leable in the fiery furnace of public obligation.
But the sight of John Prescott makes you think the horses have bolted. He is the worst advertisement for democracy since Aaron Burr. Prescott or death? Give us death, at once. If the long road from the Magna Carta leads to Prescott, we want dictatorship. Give us Emperor Tony. It was all a horrible mistake.
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