I’d wager my considerable mortgage that the “Mouth of the Humber” has taken better telephone calls.
“Hi, John, I’d like to talk to you about your affair with Tracey Temple.” Thus began a conversation that was to lead to the Deputy Prime Minister giving the Daily Mirror a personal statement about a very public error.
John Prescott has a reputation for being thin-skinned, a big beast who thinks that no Tory or Liberal Democrat belt – or, on occasion, new Labour belt – is too low to hit below yet has a reputation for loudly complaining at slights, real or imagined, in the hurly-burly world of Westminster.
I’ve been on the receiving end of my fair share of verbal blasts from the old seadog over the years. The message “I’ve got the Deputy Prime Minister on the line” ranked high among the most feared phrases in SW1 and was guaranteed to send me, or any other journalist I know, frantically groping for the earplugs.
And yet, the John Prescott I spoke to was unusually composed during this call – the calm before the unforgiving storm he would have known was about to engulf him when voters read the jaw-dropping disclosure that has rocked a government he has done so much to sustain.
He didn’t shout, nor did he swear as I went through what we knew, describing to the Deputy PM those now famous photographs of a civil service secretary unbuttoning the shirt of one of the most powerful men in Britain at a Christmas party in his Whitehall office.
I will admit that Prescott has gone up a bit in my estimation because of the way he responded to that call, taking it on the chin. A lot of the lesser politicians I have the misfortune to deal with would have been squealing like babies.
Jeffrey Archer reached for his lawyer’s number, with disastrous consequences. A string of others have tried, and failed, to deny the undeniable when the writing is on the wall in letters six feet high.
Prescott acknowledged his affair was a matter of legitimate public interest and never sought to pretend otherwise, even as he prepared to admit the heart-breaking truth to Pauline, his wife.
Subsequent attempts to report certain newspapers to the Press Complaints Commission cite specific instances when Prescott’s family and friends were alleg-edly harassed by reporters or snappers supposedly pointing telephoto lenses at windows.
But asking the PCC to arbitrate between the competing memories of Prescott and Temple over exactly what the two former lovers got up to, not to mention where and when, would be beyond the judgement of Solomon, even when the king was on top of his biblical game.
Prescott now needs to prove, in public, that he’s down but not yet out.
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