His old Labour credentials once made him indispensable, but now the Deputy Prime Minister's star is waning. What went wrong? Jackie Ashley reports
''Prescott hits the buffers," screams the Sun, with a prediction that the Deputy Prime Minister, the hero of old Labour, will be demoted to the Cabinet Office to serve out his sunset years before being booted upstairs to the Lords. It was hardly the Sun's greatest scoop - it has been Westminster gossip for months that John Prescott will leave the unwieldy Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) after the election. But is it really the end for him? And if so, how has Labour's living, breathing representative of the working classes become so expendable? Remember, this was the man who rescued John Smith from a crushing defeat over one member, one vote at the party conference. This was the man whose name on Tony Blair's leadership ticket pushed Blair over the finishing line. So where's the payback now?
Prescott himself would put it differently. After four years running a big spending department, he wants to put his experience of co-ordinating different strands of policy to use in a revamped Cabinet Office - a Prime Minister's Office in all but name. He sees the need for heads to be banged together, and he won't shirk from banging them. But is he really, as some MPs and commentators are saying, a busted flush?
The case for Prescott is not difficult to make, but it is patchy. Inside the government, he represents a vital part of the labour movement as nobody else can. Gordon Brown is the nearest, with his strong trade union networking; but no Scot can claim to understand the heart of English labourism. Indeed, Prescott's core achievement, which is to have secured from the Treasury a huge ten-year programme for transport renewal, depended entirely on one of the most under-reported but vital relationships in the 1997-2001 government, the Prescott-Brown pact. In return, Prescott has allowed Brown free range to act, in effect, as the deputy prime minister, running across domestic policy unhindered by the official deputy. He has also backed the Chancellor to the hilt in his feud with Ken Livingstone over how to fund the London Tube system.
Yet in the crucial first two Budgets of the new government, health and education, not transport, got the modest amount of extra spending that was available. The result was that, throughout this parliament, transport has been a disaster area for the government, from the rail disasters to clogged roads to the long squabble over the Underground. Prescott can justifiably point to his long-term promise on transport renewal, but today's travellers are equally justified in raging at him.
Outside transport, Prescott's big achievement, the post-Kyoto politics of global warming, has been brutally knocked aside by something he certainly cannot be blamed for - the arrival of a US president in hock to "Big Oil" and more concerned with paying back his political debts to American business than with the future of the world's climate. Diplomacy may not be Prescott's strong point (as he showed in his unhappy contretemps with the French foreign minister, culminating in one of his memorable lines: "A chauvinist, moi?"). Yet in the balance of history, he will go down as one of those negotiators, trained in the British union movement, who was far better on the international stage than his detractors expected.
The case for the defence, however, depends on not asking whether he could have done better. Don't forget that Prescott was once seen as a Titan in the making. He had given his supporters hope that, like another working-class union leader turned Labour Cabinet minister, he could be a commanding figure. Yet no one today would call him the Ernie Bevin of the early 2000s. The most that can be said is that his support has allowed Blair to pursue his agenda without a horrific fracture in the party. The left will not forgive Prescott for that. Steve Bell's cruel caricature of him as the perpetually silenced, furious-but-loyal dog "Market", humiliated by the grinning premier, sums up this point of view.
Equally important, the DETR has been a flop. Had there been a single, senior transport secretary pushing for early money and early decisions on an integrated transport policy, surely things would have been better today. That Lord (Gus) Macdonald has made such a name for himself that he is tipped for all sorts of grand promotions shows how important the transport portfolio is in its own right.
You can say something similar about the environment; Michael Meacher may have an engaging and mildly dangerous capacity to speak the truth, whether it is about the depth of the rural crisis or the carcinogenic possibilities of mass cattle burning, but he has been one of the undoubted, if surprising, successes of the first Blair government.
Ah, you could say, but does this not show good delegation on Prescott's part? The trouble is, no one can say what the DETR has done that separate departments could not have done better. It has produced no synergy, no special source of Whitehall energy that was not there before. Like other experiments in monster departments in the 1970s, it has got in the way rather than helped.
We are left with the regional agenda. Here, Prescott has made progress in establishing regional development agencies that might, in due course, attract proper democratic bodies and therefore rewrite the English constitution. But this leads us on to the most fascinating and unresolved internal political issue, the euro aside, that new Labour faces.
Prescott's claim to influence is that he speaks for the England of the north and the Midlands that feels left behind by Scotland, Wales and London. His heavy hint earlier this month about "blood on the floor", when a second-term Labour government revises the Barnett formula that gives the Scots more than their fair share of resources, was slapped down by Downing Street, under pressure from an irate Treasury. But that is the fight that cannot be put off for long.
Everything depends on which way Blair jumps. Logically, he should keep Prescott as a big player and go with him for English regional government. He is, after all, a northern MP himself. Blair is also a keen pro-European, and English regionalism fits with the vision of the future EU held by the federalist Germans. Third, he knows that, one way or another, the English question has to be resolved: regionalism is at least half an answer. Finally, he is looking, post-Mandelson, for a counterweight to the mighty power of Brown's Treasury. If not Prescott and English regionalism, then what? Brown is eager to protect Scottish spending and his own power base. But an alliance of Blair, Prescott and, say, David Blunkett and Jack Straw - all with more English concerns - would be a match even for this Treasury.
Here is the problem, however, for Prescott. The whole history of Whitehall suggests that if you don't have a secure and powerful departmental base of your own, you get pushed out. English regionalism is not, as it might at first seem, an easy or uncontroversial thing. For a start, though it may be popular with the public sector in the north, or Yorkshire, it is unpopular across great swathes of Middle England, where county and city loyalties matter far more. And overgovernment is a rising concern these days. Just adding on another layer of government is not going to be easy to sell, not least to Labour councillors.
It may be that Prescott could cut through all that without a large department behind him, but it would be a first. To succeed, he would need the vigorous support of Tony Blair, yet he would no longer be a big baron in his own right. In other words, he would be more, not less, dependent on the personal patronage of the PM. For a proud man, this is not a happy prospect. Other ministers say that he does not seem sure what he really wants any more. Is it to be a big player under Blair in the second term, or is he really looking for a kind of grand, officially titled semi-retirement? Either way, younger ministers jockeying for position are vicious about him.
They smell blood, all right. A real deputy prime minister would be closer to Blair than Prescott is today; unelected people - Alastair Campbell, Derry Irvine, Lords Falconer and Macdonald - fill the gap. Even his old enemy Peter Mandelson, again in exile, has more real access than he does. Nor has Prescott built up a significant following of MPs and junior ministers, as others have. His "club" of supporters in government is tiny. With "the party" a much diminished force, Blair will not face an army of people hammering on his door if Prescott is seen to be passed over.
Prescott can say this at least: those who thought he would "blow up" early under the strain of high office were proved wrong. Despite his syntax and the mockery induced by his motoring habits, the snobs must admit that his work rate and negotiating ability were greater than they realised. In a government of smooth and plausible actors, his gritty ill-temper came to seem honest, even admirable. He is likely to last in some form after the election. Whatever happens, he will continue to be lavishly praised and patronised in public. But in terms of big policy, the Deputy PM is no longer motoring. "Two Jags", like much of the rest of the country, has run out of road.
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