John Prescott, who rose through Britain’s trade union movement to become one of the country’s best-known politicians and serve as deputy prime minister for a decade, has died. He was 86.
In a statement on social media, his family said he died peacefully on Wednesday, “surrounded by the love of his family and the jazz music of Marian Montgomery.” The statement noted that he had suffered a stroke in 2019 and had latterly been living with Alzheimer’s disease.
Plain-speaking and proudly working class, Mr. Prescott served as a visible link to Labour’s traditional origins when the party came to power in 1997 under the modernizing leadership of Tony Blair.
In government, Mr. Prescott championed environmental causes — playing a key role in international climate negotiations — and worked hard to shift power from London to the English regions.
More important for Labour, he helped defuse internal tensions between Mr. Blair and his chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, a rival who would eventually become Mr. Blair’s successor. At the time, Mr. Prescott was jokingly referred to as the political equivalent of a marriage guidance counselor.
In an age when politics became increasingly managed by media advisers known as spin doctors, Mr. Prescott stood out as an authentic, if unorthodox, communicator. He sometimes mangled his sentences, but even when his syntax was less than perfect, his meaning was clear.
Mr. Prescott also had a reputation as a pugnacious political bruiser. When a protester on the campaign trail threw an egg at him ahead of the 2001 general election, Mr. Prescott turned and punched him. Some assumed his career was over. But polling showed that most Britons concluded that he had done what they would have in the circumstances, and Labour’s campaign proceeded to victory uninterrupted.
John Leslie Prescott was born in Wales in 1938. He did not prosper in Britain’s selective education system of the time, which streamed children’s academic futures via an examination at age 11. He failed that test and, unlike his brother who passed, was denied the new bicycle he had been promised by his father. He left school four years later, though he subsequently studied at Ruskin College, a higher education institution in Oxford, and at the University of Hull, the city that became his home.
As a teenager, Mr. Prescott became a steward on a cruise ship, embarking on a career at sea that was to shape his rise in politics. Years later, political opponents occasionally taunted Mr. Prescott by suggesting that he fetch them a gin and tonic, but he remained proud of his origins. As a senior politician, Mr. Prescott would hold a summer party on a boat in the Thames and would make a point of extracting money from his guests to tip the staff.
In 1968, Mr. Prescott became an official at the National Union of Seamen. He was elected to Parliament two years later as Labour lawmaker for Hull East, in northeastern England. He joined Labour’s top opposition team, the shadow cabinet, in 1983.
In 1994, after the death of the Labour leader John Smith, Mr. Blair was elected as his successor. Mr. Prescott won the deputy leadership, a victory that reassured many traditional Labour supporters that the party was not abandoning its roots by embracing the solidly middle-class Mr. Blair, who rebranded the party as “New Labour.”
Even as Mr. Prescott became a symbol of social mobility and a mascot of “Old Labour,” he was on board with the project of modernization and of finding “traditional values in a modern setting” as he would put it.
His reward came when, after 18 years out of government, Labour won the 1997 general election. Mr. Prescott became both deputy prime minister and the cabinet minister responsible for the environment, transport and the regions in the new administration.
Entering his government office for the first time, Mr. Prescott, who was not normally lost for words, stopped in midsentence when the blinds started to lower. “Yes, deputy prime minister,” a civil servant explained: “It is an automatic device to control the internal temperature.”
Mr. Prescott gradually became used to his elevated position and to the trappings of power. He was nicknamed “Two Jags” by the tabloids after it emerged that he owned two Jaguar cars. He was also photographed playing croquet with his staff on the lawn at Dorneywood, the official country home that came with the job of deputy prime minister. His reputation suffered in 2006 when he admitted to a two-year affair with a civil servant.
In Mr. Prescott’s political endeavors, environmental issues were a central concern. Among the tributes paid to him on Thursday was one from Al Gore, the American former vice president, who praised Mr. Prescott’s work in helping to negotiate the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
During his decade as deputy prime minister, Mr. Prescott remained committed to advancing the causes of working people. In an interview in 2005, he said: “The one distinctive thing about the European approach, both right and left, is the belief that the social dimension goes along with the economic. The American model might produce more jobs, but it couldn’t really care a damn about the social justice.”
Mr. Prescott retired as an elected lawmaker in 2010 and was made a member of the House of Lords, the second chamber of Parliament. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Pauline, and by his two sons.
On Thursday, Mr. Blair paid tribute to his former deputy, telling the BBC that there was “no one quite like him in British politics.” Mr. Brown called Mr. Prescott “a colossus” and “a titan of the Labour movement.”
There was also praise from Peter Mandelson, another architect of Labor’s modernization who is now a member of the House of Lords. He told Sky News that Mr. Prescott “kept us anchored in our working-class roots, our trade union history.”
“He was in many respects,” Mr. Mandelson added, “the cement that kept New Labour together.”
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