The real disgrace is a fit of bogus morality about Prescott
Rod Liddle say that — whatever his political failures — the Deputy Prime Minister is the victim of a deplorably hypocritical press assault Ispent Bank Holiday Monday trying to find out everything I could about Jo Knowsley, for your benefit. I didn’t find out very much. Certain questions, crucial to the public interest, remain unanswered — so I will have to speculate about them instead, a little later on in this article.
Jo was one of the plethora of journalists charged, last weekend, with investing weight and significance to the semi-literate diary scribblings of a certain Tracey Temple, the woman who frequently had sexual intercourse with John Prescott. Tracey told her story to the national newspapers, via the deeply moral conduit of Max Clifford, on a point of principle: it was only right that she should arrest the impression which had been painted of her in the press. That of a bit of a slapper. Was this not a perfect example of what Max Clifford always insists is a case of the weak (Ms Temple) versus the powerful (the Deputy Prime Minister)? Predatory Prescott prowling the Palace of Westminster, irresistible to all women whom he chanced upon, and poor, lowly Tracey suddenly, inexplicably, unaccountably finding her knickers around her ankles.
So there was a point of principle, then and also vast, humungous loads of dosh to be trousered. I wonder which was the clincher? I heard a figure of £250,000 mentioned, but that surely cannot be true. I think I would sleep with John Prescott for a quarter of a million quid.
I don’t share with the likes of John Lloyd and Steve Richards a general disaffection with the British press; I don’t think that, on the whole, politicians are ill treated by journalists — in fact, I worry that the Westminster cabal of political hacks is sometimes all too understanding of and compliant with political chicanery, wilful obfuscation and incompetence. But the screed of bilge about Prescott, the desperate, flailing attempts to append political significance and abuse of office to his sexual shenanigans had the reek of hypocrisy and disingenuousness about them. John Prescott had an affair with someone who worked with him, and I would not deny (as the BBC is wont to do) that this is worthy of press coverage. The manner in which people conduct their private lives undoubtedly affects our judgment of them. There will be voters who believe that sexual transgressions are unbecoming and sufficient to bar the transgressors from high office. There will be others — the majority, I suspect — who think that they have no political resonance whatsoever but are rather good fun to read about, especially when it happens to unlikely people like Prescott.
The thought of John Prescott having sex is plainly either hilarious or repulsive, like those David Attenborough clips of hippopotamus mating. Equally, we might snigger for a moment and then remember loyal Pauline Prescott and feel a pang of sympathy and regret. So I suppose, on those grounds, the affair was worth reporting. But to shoehorn into the prurience and glee at the details some notion that Prescott had abused his office — and then to work ourselves into a frenzy about the possibility that he might have misused taxpayers’ money to facilitate the affair — is an utter nonsense. It is a fig leaf; an excuse for the acres of coverage and the vast amount of money paid to Ms Temple; an attempt to assuage our suspicions that our interest was not merely prurient and perhaps a little gleeful, but invested with real meaning. So, Prescott used his ‘grace and favour’ apartments for his acts of indiscretion, did he? Well, blow me down. You mean he chose to have sex with Ms Temple in his London home rather than in the doorway of Dolcis or at the marital home in Hull, aka Prescott Towers? And Tracey Temple accompanied him, sometimes, in his ministerial car, did she? What a grotesque abuse of office that is! Would you be happier if she forked out for part of the petrol costs and maybe the insurance? What stupidity!
This fatuous, sententious tone infested every one of the newspaper reports last weekend. Prescott and Temple did not have sex or make love or shag — instead, he ‘demanded’ sex; she ‘gave him’ sex or ‘performed a sex act’ upon him. Every word written was designed to imply that Tracey Temple was in some way a victim in the affair, helplessly yielding up her body unwillingly to this arrogant and predatory beast. And yet, by her own testimony, this is not how it happened at all. She reckoned that he cared for her; she loved him.
Which brings us back, albeit briefly, to Jo Knowsley. Her copy, for the Mail on Sunday, was the pick of the bunch for breathless stupidity. Here’s an excerpt: ‘The couple [that’s John’n’Trace] would regularly grope and grapple during the working day and she had repeated assignments with him at his plush Admiralty house apartment funded by the taxpayer — once, shockingly, after a solemn memorial service to honour the Iraqi fallen.’ Well, leave aside the contention that one man’s grope and grapple is another man’s caress, or that the assignations actually took place at his home. It’s the use of the word ‘shockingly’ that moved me to investigate the private life of Ms Knowsley. We know very little about her, save that she is in her forties and has been heard, allegedly, to brag around the Mail on Sunday newsroom of the prowess of her toy-boy lover. Now here’s that question of crucial public concern I alluded to earlier: not so long ago Jo wrote a distressing article about a pig being boiled alive in a vat of oil. What a horrible, disaffecting sight that must have been. But my point is this: did she, ‘shockingly’, give sex to or perform a sex act upon her toy-boy lover shortly after filing such a solemn piece of reportage? Or did she leave it for an hour or two? We simply do not know. She has also had something of a scoop recently: another story of hers suggested that all watercoolers can kill you. How many minutes after writing this important, ground-breaking item did she, ‘shockingly’, demand sex from her toyboy? And where exactly did she demand sex? And how? And is it appropriate for someone who is deployed to pontificate upon the sexual behaviour of others to brag about a toy-boy lover?
Sorry Jo — but you asked for it. But let’s leave her aside for a moment and look at the real scandal, the real irony, of this story.
John Prescott has been an almost incalculably incompetent government minister. His very presence in high office was the result of political expediency — frankly, he was a juicy pork chop thrown to the hurt and starving old Labour faithful when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Look guys, Clause 4 may have gone, but you’ve still got good ol’ John. And so we have been saddled with the man as Deputy Prime Minister for nine long years. We should be truly outraged by this fact. Not simply on account of his blithe inarticulacy when circumstances demand that he stand in for the Prime Minister in Parliament. But for the Millennium Dome — a monumental fiasco for which he bears a lot of responsibility, alongside the Prime Minister, the ridiculous Peter Mandelson and that remote and ineffectual grandee Michael Heseltine (who, interestingly, has found time in recent days to castigate Mr Prescott for his affair with Ms Temple).
And we should be outraged by Mr Prescott’s wildly misjudged attempt to foist upon the English regions local assemblies another layer of bureaucracy — an idea wholly rejected by even the most partisan Labour voters in the party’s traditional heartlands. And also for attempting to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the suffocatingly crowded south-east of England without a moment’s thought as to the environmental — or social — impact this might have upon the people already living there, and indeed upon the beautiful countryside which surrounds them. His mistakes and miscalculations are legion; we should be outraged by them all and we should demand his resignation.
Or, for that matter, the resignation of Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. Here is a man who, to put it at its most kindly, has presided over gross incompetence in his government department and, further, chose not to reveal to the Prime Minister or Parliament or the public how egregiously he had failed until someone else (a Conservative politician, as it happened) forced him to. He is still in office, insisting that the appropriate punishment for such inordinate, calamitous failure and dissembling should be the continued imposition of the burden of merely staying in one’s job. To, you know, put it right. Now there’s an outrage.
And yet we get worked up by the possibility that the Deputy Prime Minister had an affair which may have taken place within locations funded in part by the taxpayer. As they say: you couldn’t make it up.
Previous page
