UK: Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott Passes at 86

Facts

• Former Deputy Prime Minister Lord John Prescott has died aged 86, with his family writing in a thread on X that he passed "peacefully" on Wednesday "surrounded by the love of his family and the jazz music of Marian Montgomery."^[1][2]
• Born in Wales in 1938 before moving near Rotherham at the age of four, Prescott left school at age 15 with no qualifications, studied economics at Hull University — and became a trade union activist, leading a national seamen's strike in 1966.^[3][4]
• He then successfully ran for the parliamentary seat of Kingston upon Hull East in 1970 and remained a member of parliament for 40 years. Prescott sat on the party's National Executive Committee for 25 years, and lost out twice to become Labour deputy leader in 1988 and 1992 respectively.^[5]
• Prescott then became deputy prime minister to Sir Tony Blair in 1997 after Labour's election victory and held the role for ten years. He was ennobled in 2010 before experiencing a stroke in 2019 and later being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Prescott left the House of Lords in July of this year.^[6]
• During the 2001 general election campaign, Prescott famously punched a protester who had thrown an egg at him in North Wales and later claimed he told Blair "you told us to connect with the electorate, so I did."^[7][8]
• Blair has said that he is "devastated" by Prescott's passing, and claimed that there was "no one quite like him in British politics." Former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has described Prescott as a "titan of the Labour movement," while current Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has called him a "one off."^[9]

Sources: ^[1]X, ^[2]BBC News (a), ^[3]The Telegraph, ^[4]The Guardian, ^[5]Sky News, ^[6]The Times, ^[7]GB News, ^[8]The Mirror and ^[9]BBC News (b).

Narratives

• Left narrative, as provided by Novara Media. For many, Prescott was and forever will be a shining beacon of the Labour Party's core values. Having left school without qualifications before becoming a union activist, a local advocate for Hull, and a working-class counterweight to Tony Blair's air of elitism, there are not many left within Labour who can truly claim to be of the people in a way Prescott so unapologetically was. A man who acted as a bridge between both Blair and Brown as well as Old and New Labour, his passing is a true loss for British politics.
• Right narrative, as provided by The Telegraph and The Spectator (UK). Prescott's death has led to inevitable comparisons between himself and his modern equivalent, Angela Rayner. Yet this reflection on the past has only made it ever clearer that the current Labour ticket remains but a cheap imitation of the New Labour titans of the past. While Rayner is no Prescott, she is certainly helped by the fact that Starmer is even less so like Blair — only time will tell if she can achieve what her mentor couldn't quite do and lead the country as a left-wing Labour Prime Minister.