A government of Neros
John Prescott has always claimed to be one of the unacknowledged founders of New Labour. It is certainly true that he took an early lead in modernising the party’s structure, championing the Private Finance Initiative and the coining of slogans: ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ came from the Prescott camp, not the restaurants of Islington.
But the Deputy Prime Minister’s true significance to the Blair era has been even deeper. He has been the indispensable bridge between the Prime Minister and the Labour movement, the sidekick who has vouched for Tony Blair when he has appeared to be desecrating all that the party stands for.
Mr Prescott’s departmental portfolio has always been incidental; he is a lousy minister who has presided over failure in transport, environment and housing policy. But his ministerial responsibilities — rather than Dorneywood — were always his true perks. The Deputy Prime Minister’s real job was to keep the peace between Mr Blair and the Labour party and, in later years, to broker a succession deal between the Prime Minister and Chancellor. In fairness to Mr Prescott, both tasks would try the patience of angels.
Since the disclosure of his affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple — which may have involved a breach of his own departmental rules — Mr Prescott has cut a pathetically diminished figure. For the first time, Labour members have turned on the Deputy Prime Minister, treating him not as a flawed colossus of their movement but as an embarrassing Falstaff who has brought the party into disrepute. It is not sexual morality that has done for Mr Prescott but the whiff of decadence; there is a sense among the Labour rank and file that his credibility is in tatters, that he has turned Whitehall into a playground for trysts and croquet. It is no surprise that the obstinate Deputy Prime Minister has let it be known that he will not go quietly. His message to Mr Blair has been: if I am forced out, you will be next. In fact, Mr Prescott need not have bothered. The Prime Minister has signalled no less clearly that he wants to leave office at the same time as his Deputy. Last week No. 10 said that Mr Prescott had the ‘absolute full confidence’ of the Prime Minister. And, for once, Mr Blair and Mr Brown are in agreement. The Chancellor has done his best to shore up the Deputy Prime Minister. Nobody at the apex of New Labour wants Mr Prescott to go.
This has nothing to do with loyalty or sentimentality: it reflects an entirely practical terror of the decisions his departure would force upon the party’s high command. If he stood down as Deputy Prime Minister, who, if anyone, would replace him? If he resigned the party’s deputy leadership — a post he has held for 12 years Labour would be plunged into a hugely divisive contest fraught with ideological content and personal rivalry.
Already, Harriet Harman, a close lieutenant of Mr Brown, has made clear her ambition to succeed Mr Prescott. Peter Hain takes soundings. Alan Johnson has a growing phalanx of supporters. Jack Straw has at least as strong a claim as any of these contenders. There would surely be a candidate from the irreconcilable Left, a neoBennite putting down a marker. A contest for the deputy leadership, in other words, would become a wholly unpredictable public row over the future of the Labour party and, by implication, the strategy it should adopt to defeat David Cameron. The Prime Minister and Chancellor are as one in their determination to prevent such a contest happening before Mr Blair’s own departure.
This in itself tells us much about the fatal introspection of New Labour, nine years after it took office. In order to defer an argument about the party’s trajectory, Messrs Blair and Brown keep in post a man who has come to personify the administrative incompetence of the government. Many in the Labour party found the photographs of Mr Prescott playing croquet at Dorneywood offensive because they associate the game with upper-class leisure. But the true toxicity of the images has nothing to do with class. Rather, they encapsulate the public’s growing suspicion that this is a Neronian government, fiddling while Rome burns.
The Home Secretary is forced to admit that his department is sometimes ‘dysfunctional’; the tax credit system remains a shambles; so do the procedures for dealing with foreign prisoners; an NHS computer system is two years late and £14 billion over budget; fraud and waste in the public sector have risen by 33 per cent in the past two years. We keep being told that Mr Prescott is an indispensable co-ordinator of government policy. Last week Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, said it was important to acknowledge ‘how important these Cabinet subcommittees that [Mr Prescott] will chair are to the delivery of the government’s policy’. That may be so. But recent experience suggests that all these committees are achieving precisely nothing. The precocious dynamism of 1997 is a distant memory. This is a government associated with inertia, incompetence and sleaze.
Once a symbol of the New Labour coalition, Mr Prescott has become a symbol of that coalition’s collapse and its ineptitude as a governing party. As The Spectator goes to press, he is still Deputy Prime Minister and deputy leader of the Labour party. He may yet be driven from one or both posts by fresh disclosures. But two things can be said with certainty: that Mr Blair does not want Mr Prescott to go, and that his departure would not solve the problem he has come to personify.
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