Prescott was like a man who’d bolted too many pickled eggs
GREETINGS from a blue-skied Brighton, where the Labour conference soon gave us a cameo from that sunbeam John Prescott. His lordship vouchsafed an interview to BBC1’s Sunday Politics programme. With the party riven and rancid, new leader Jeremy Corbyn had suggested that dissent was permitted. ‘Is it so disastrous in politics when there are two opinions?’
Mr Corbyn’s spin of tolerance had not reached Lord Prescott, already a trenchant Corbynista though he supported Andy Burnham for the job. Like a bourgeois official trying to prove loyalty to Chairman Mao, Lord Prescott was indignant on the new ruler’s behalf.
He was i nterviewed s t anding hi gh above the beach at some outside location. First he had a swipe at Peter Mandelson – ‘I don’t think he’s listened to in the party’. He threw his head from side to side, declining to look into the camera lens. Prescott, man of menace.
Next to be biffed: Harriet Harman and her feminists (who feel the Corbynites are sexist). ‘ Why the hell are they moaning?’ demanded Lord Prescott. The words ‘silly Dorises’ were not uttered but that may only have been because he had run alarmingly short of breath, as can happen when he is a-boil.
Ed Miliband took a minor beating from Lord Prescott (I forget quite why – it was hard to keep up).
Interviewer Andrew Neil mentioned a Corbyn critic, Labour MP Chris Leslie. Lord Prescott’s gaze narrowed and there came to his eyes that look of compressed discomfort than can afflict a man when he has bolted too many pickled eggs.
He briefly misplaced Mr Leslie’s name – an old trick of belittlement – before spurting forth a long condemnation, not all of it recognisably in English, of the old Blairite ways. ‘We’ve had decades of that and it ruddy well failed,’ he cried. You said it, mate.
Mr Corbyn’s earlier comments in a TV appearance had been ‘a brillinter’ (Prescottspeak for ‘brilliant interview’). He was less keen on Shadow Chancellor John ‘ Up the IRA’ McDonnell, whose economic ideas were shrugged aside by Lord Prescott like an unwanted restaurant roll. A scooter passed below on the road and made, I regret to say, a distinct farting sound. We must hope it was the scooter, anyway.
AT this point Mr Neil mentioned Mr Corbyn’s reluctance to genuflect to the Queen when he takes the Privy Council oath. Whoa! Lord Prescott attacked the media for its interest in minor matters – ‘ whether you have the national health and you’re going to sing it’. Sing the national health?
‘Every person’s on about kneeling,’ roared Prescott, pushing forward his tummy as l adies do at Zumba. He pulled a Les Dawson face. ‘You don’t do that. You hop from one chair to another and brush your lips lightly across her hand.’ If nothing else, this disclosure about Lord Prescott’s initiation to the Privy Council – which plainly resembled a nursery game of bumps-a-daisy – suggests that the Queen retains a sense of the ridiculous. Does she make everyone hop? Or did Prince Philip suggest it specially for Prescott?
In the conference hall, a muted atmosphere prevailed. Mr Corbyn gave the retiring Harriet Harman a bunch of flowers (yikes, that’s a bit gender- delineational, isn’t it?)
and delegates sat glumly through speeches by household names such as Angela Eagle, Kate Green and a nice little gay chap from the Irish Labour party.
The preferred vocative here is not so much ‘comrades!’ as ‘sisters and bruvvers!’ Miss Green, herself posh, denounced ‘David Cameron’s vicious Government’ before, in the next sentence, deploring ‘the language of division’.
The stage set carries the slogan ‘Straight Talking, Honest Politics’ and is painted in about seven shades of pink – an explosion in a lipstick factory. The back wall’s central entrance point i s blue and resembles the doorway of a gents’ municipal lavatory.
Former GMTV presenter Gloria De Piero, now Labour’s ‘Shadow Minister for Young People’, also spoke, pulling more faces of ridiculous confected grief than Dame Edna Everage. What an actress!