A Journey (57 page)

Naturally for the media, already bored to death with a campaign whose outcome seemed not to be in doubt, it was manna from heaven. She became an overnight star. There was a great rejoicing that at last Labour’s slick machine had run into a ‘real’ person. There was a running theme – pushed hard by the
Mail
– that we were not meeting ‘real’ people, but that everything was stage-managed. In fact, I’ve never come across a campaign in an election that wasn’t stage-managed (though whether well or badly is another matter). And of course we were meeting lots of people.

Here’s the thing: a person is not a ‘real’ person unless they are bawling out a politician; unless there’s a scene; unless there’s anger, and preferably rudeness. Only a scene gives the news its impact. The truth is that most ‘real’ people – I mean real ‘real’ people – don’t behave in that way at all. Most Britons are polite. They listen. They may disagree, but they do so reasonably. You meet plenty of them, but they aren’t ‘real’ because they are not combustible.

A curious but highly significant phenomenon was developing: the celebration of the protest. Let’s say a politician attends a meeting at which there are a thousand people present, and one of them shouts something. The other 999 people can be supportive, or at least reasonable in their opposition, but the lone disruptive voice is presented as representative when the chances are it isn’t. Most people don’t make a scene, so by definition the sole protester is atypical, not typical.

I recall a visit to Hebron in Palestine after I left office, when I went to the Ibrahimi Mosque where the New York Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein had murdered Muslim worshippers in 1994. There was a single voice of protest who shouted at me, who turned out to be a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group banned in certain countries and totally unrepresentative of most Palestinian opinion. The next day it was literally the only news out of the visit. The protester was interviewed, and his opinion debated and analysed. All other voices were delegitimised. No one else got a look-in.

It’s a key development in the reporting of modern politics, and the more people realise it, the more they attempt to disrupt. It has now become absolutely the paradigm within which the news is created. Throw something, heckle, confront, storm the stage and you lead the news, with your views thereby legitimised. The politician looks astounded or affronted, cannot retaliate (with an exception I am about to relate) and thus there’s only one winner. That is why more and more people do it. Not for an instant does it advance debate or necessarily represent opinion. Any argument conducted in heat is a clash of views, not an exchange of views. No matter; it’s news!

Anyway, this, rather than the manifesto, was obviously going to dominate. I sort of staggered off round the cardiac centre, realising that the big launch day was written off.

But things were only just warming up. After a quick lunch, I heard the news that Jack Straw had got slow-hand-clapped at the Police Federation Conference. He told me afterwards – and Jack, to be fair, was very grown-up about such things – that what was amusing was that the audience reaction appeared completely divorced from the content of his speech. Not being daft, Jack had decided in the middle of an election campaign to give a pretty routine and fairly hard-line law and order speech; but they were having none of it. He could have doubled their pay and they were going to boo him. (Well, that might have stopped them.)

So by late afternoon, you would have thought the nation was in revolt at this government they were about to re-elect with another landslide. Part of the problem when the Opposition is useless is that the public feel strangely disenfranchised. This was how many Labour people felt during the Thatcher years. It’s why after 1992 Labour started to consider electoral reform. We had lost four elections in a row. The system must be faulty, mustn’t it? Whereas, of course, we were at fault. So this sense of alienation is not, in fact, reasonable. Actually, it’s worse than that; it is profoundly undemocratic. It’s the losing side feeling it shouldn’t have lost and trying to manufacture a rerun, or a change of the rules.

Here is where a progressive government is often treated differently from a Conservative one: the Tory side thinks it really should be in power, and if it isn’t, someone isn’t playing fair. When Labour was out of power for eighteen years, the attempts by some groups (like parts of organised Labour in the miners’ strike) to upend the democratic result were widely and rightly seen as wrong, whatever sympathy people felt for individual miners. But when, as in our time, the boot was on the other foot, such opposition was regularly portrayed as an entirely justifiable protest by people inexplicably denied their legitimate voice.

There was thus a weird disconnection between public opinion as expressed in the polls (and indeed in the result), and the public opinion apparently struggling under the oppression of a government, against whom severe action had to be taken because there was no alternative, since the democratic system was for some reason or other not working as it should. Towards the end of my time in office, this meant that those who leaked government papers, for example, were treated as people’s heroes rather than condemned for a breach of confidence.

On that day, the interaction between government and governed was given a monumental, vivid and impactful expression beyond the media’s wildest dreams. John Prescott was doing a campaign meeting in Rhyl, North Wales. There was the normal motley crew of protesters outside to jeer him on the way in. As he walked down the gauntlet, a big bloke, with an amazing mullet hairstyle from the 1970s, slapped an egg on him; John turned round and give him a sharp left hook, which sent him sprawling. After that, well, you can imagine. Even if instead of our manifesto launch of profound and detailed policy nuggets we had got up and danced the can-can, it wouldn’t have mattered.

I had been doing a TV programme with voters, compered by Jonathan Dimbleby. Alastair had kept the incident with John from me before the programme, which was recorded just after it took place and before it could be assimilated into the questioning. As I got into the car afterwards, glad to have got out of the studio more or less intact, Alastair said cheerfully: ‘Um, there’s some more news. John Prescott just thumped a voter.’

I misheard him. ‘Someone’s hit John?’ I said. ‘That’s awful!’

‘No,’ he said, ‘John did the hitting. He just belted someone.’

You know when they say in books ‘His jaw dropped’? Well, it happens. My jaw dropped.

There began a period of intense reflection, analysis, introspection, retrospection and general panic about what to do. We knew we had twelve hours before the press conference the next morning, and we had to have a line by then. The deputy prime minister assaulting a member of the public, even one who slapped an egg on him, was at one level mind-boggling and grave. At another, it was mind-boggling and comic.

Looking back, I know now the comic wins out, but I can assure you it wasn’t clear-cut at the time. How the comic won out provides an interesting insight into how instinct in politics is so important; and also a sense of proportion, even when all around you proportion is being chucked overboard.

I personally felt the thing was extraordinarily funny. The egg was funny. The mullet was funny. The left hook was funny. The expressions on both their faces were funny. But there was no getting away from another point of view, and some of the women in the operation were voicing it loudly: you can’t have the deputy prime minister doing that. It was undignified. It was macho. People would be repelled, appalled, ashamed, etc.

The Southern women took this view strongly. Anji, surprisingly, was of the same mind, but I wondered later whether that wasn’t because Adam Boulton from Sky News (whom she subsequently married), with whom she may well have discussed it, had taken a position of such disgust about it and was very up on his high horse. Anji’s instincts were normally superb. Even the usually certain Sally was uncertain. So was Alastair, though that may have been Fiona’s influence. But most of the blokes and the Labour Party staff, men and women, were riotously with John.

I decided an apology at least might be in order, to take the sting out of it, genuflect a little in the direction of the soft Southerners. So I phoned John. I began at my most mellifluous. Sorry about what happened. Dreadful of him to do that. Must have been a shock. Really, in the heat of the moment, not surprising. After about five minutes of this guff, John interrupted me. ‘I know you,’ he said, ‘I know what you’re up to. You want me to apologise.’

‘Well—’ I started to say.

‘Aye, well, I’m bloody well not. So you can forget it.’

I got a little more steely and became insistent; and as ever with John, when he knew I was really serious, he was prepared to accommodate. So we agreed some form of words and the call ended.

I got home and felt uncomfortable. The news was of course near hysterical, the Tories jumping all over it and the Liberals being very ‘Liberal-ish’, i.e. wet. But I still couldn’t quite bring myself to feel I should condemn it.

I went up to the flat where Cherie was waiting. ‘What a day!’ I said. ‘My God, what was John thinking of? People say it’s terrible,’ I said, testing her out. She’s a QC, liberal, lives in London.

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ she said with a snort. ‘Why shouldn’t he hit him? The other man hit him first.’ You see, she is also a Liverpool girl. ‘Well, what would you have done?’ she said. ‘Put on one of your smiles and ask him not to do it again? He got what he deserved. John’s just a man.’

I phoned John Burton. He and all the boys were exactly of that view. ‘I think it’s great,’ said John. I rate John’s judgement very, very highly. I know world leaders with less good judgement than John. What’s more, he told me the women were of the same view up North. When the news had come on in the Trimdon Labour Club, everyone had cheered as JP hit the guy.

That settled it. However, there remained the question of how to deal with it at the press conference, when the media would undoubtedly be tut-tutting about it. I decided on the essential line: no more apology, no resigning, no nothing. Some of the team still voiced concern, but by then I had my bearings. How to express the line was a little trickier. The trouble is, you can’t actually defend the deputy prime minister hitting a voter. On the other hand, we had now decided not to condemn it.

We puzzled over it, sitting in the room preparing for the press conference. David Blunkett was there and he too was strongly of the John Burton school of thought. As the minutes ticked by – and this was world news, incidentally – we fumbled over various formulae.

‘The thing is,’ I said eventually, with about a minute to go, ‘John is John, really. Nothing more you can say.’ It was an Eric Cantona approach: you say something so enigmatic that people just move on in a somewhat confused way. So that’s what I said.

‘What do you mean “John is John”?’ they said.

I shrugged my shoulders expressively. ‘I mean John is John.’

And so the great scandal subsided. The Cherie/John Burton view also started clearly to predominate. People – or at least a lot of people – loved it. A politician turns human – wow! After forty-eight hours, back in my own patch in Sedgefield I was regularly accosted by voters, including older women, who echoed Cherie’s remark. ‘Well, what would you have done?’ they said. ‘You wouldn’t have hit him, would you, laddie?’ – and they didn’t mean it as a compliment.

And so the election launch that began with a manifesto replete with serious policy prescription for the nation’s future, ended in a mullet, an egg and a punch that sank the serious policy to the bottom of the political sea.

John Prescott always brought something unique to the Labour Party, and to the government. He could be maddening; he could be dangerous; he could be absurd; he could be magnificent. But dull, placid, uneventful and forgettable were words that would never be associated with him.

Neil Kinnock once described him as someone with a chip on both shoulders, which was true, though I always thought they somewhat balanced each other out; whereas Neil’s single chip could be more troublesome.

What did John bring to the party? A lot, actually. When John Smith died and the issue arose as to who should be deputy – it being reasonably clear I was going to win the leadership – the safe bet was certainly Margaret Beckett. She had been part of the pre-1992 economic team; she was capable and was undoubtedly a safe pair of hands. John could not be described as that; but he brought an authenticity, an appeal to the party’s traditional wing, especially within the union movement, and he had something else that I valued greatly: in a tight spot, I thought you could count on him. You couldn’t necessarily count on him in terms of individual policy items, or more generally in terms of New Labour, but, on the basis of the tiger-shooting analogy (would you venture into the jungle with this person?), he passed muster. I wasn’t so sure of Margaret. I liked and respected her, but if things got really ugly, I wasn’t sure she would step up and throw a protective cordon round me; whereas John, I thought, would do so. I never took a position in the election of a deputy. Some of my closest people voted for Margaret, but the very fact I didn’t go all out for her sent a signal that I could live with John. In any event he was the party’s preferred choice. They wanted a bit of yin and yang, and if I was very yin, he was certainly thoroughly yang.

The contrast between the two of us couldn’t have been greater. I was the private school, Oxford-educated barrister. He had been a ship’s steward, doyen of the union movement, and was proud of his working-class roots. He is one of the most fascinating characters ever to hold really high office. Nowadays, of course, John would not be John. In that, he is very similar to Dennis Skinner. Dennis is a really brilliant guy – first-rate mind, great wit, huge insight into people – but was brought up in the days when exceptionally clever people were regularly failed by the education system, or just fell between the cracks of poor schooling, and the narrow-minded views of parents and communities. But they are, thankfully in one sense, a dying breed. John had failed his eleven-plus, which must have made a terrible impact on him and been responsible for at least one of the chips on his shoulders. Yet he was naturally very clever and incredibly hard-working. Which is why, in the end, it’s not sensible to base your school system on such a test at such an age.