‘I did not anticipate John Prescott’s response after I rang to inform him I knew about his affair’

A working class hero is something to be sang another John, Lennon, and Prescott was that in spades.

True force of nature was John Prescott, the lad who overcame failing his 11-plus to be the UK’s longest-serving Deputy Prime Minister, a giant of the Labour Party and great British success story. Driving him was the simple desire to improve life for working people and he achieved that as a trade unionist, Labour MP, Cabinet Minister and, over three Government’s, Tony Blair’s wingman.

Born with no silver spoon in his mouth, mercurial Prezza could be brilliantly insightful and frustrating – sometimes both in the same mangled sentence. He was kind and funny then brutal and snarling but the many lives of John Prescott created the leader who Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer’s deputy, strives to emulate in a skirt.

JP as they called him at the top of New Labour circles was undoubtedly a victim of corrosive snobbery, ridiculed and dismissed by snooty Tories for playing croquet at Dorneywood, living in eight-bed mock Tudor “Prescott Towers” in Hull and as “Two Jags”, buying second hand cars while sitting in ministerial motors.

Boxing fellow crew members for the pleasure of paying passengers and cheap prizes while serving as a waiter on Transatlantic liners resulted decades later in privileged Tory Nicholas Soames clicking his fingers and shouting: “Mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni.”

Prescott resented the jeers yet didn’t just get angry, he got even, playing crucial roles in Labour’s 1997, 2001 and 2005 victories to mastermind huge improvements in the lives of working people as his haughty detractors whinged impotently from the sidelines.

Outlawing fox-hunting was a satisfying class victory over toffs who became his prey. Traditional values in a modern setting was the slogan of a Left-winger denounced by Harold Wilson as one of the most dangerous men in Britain during a 1966 seafarers’ strike.

Some would call his compromises too far after 1997, selling out, but his was an invaluable role as a bridge between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown plus a glue holing the labour movement’s political and industrial wings together. Prescott could point to concrete achievements modernising rundown social housing, powering regional economic growth, improving public transport, rescuing the British leg of the Eurostar rail route to France and combating climate change on the global stage.

The single incident best recalled by many was Prescott connecting with the electorate in the 2001 election by thumping a mullet-headed voter who smashed an egg on the back of his head in Rhyl, North Wales. I watched at the time, laughing and cheering while wondering whether he’d gone too far.

The seafaring pugilist who boxed for travellers, once including ousted Tory PM Anthony Eden, instinctively swung around and hit the protester with a left before, mercifully for the man, never unleashing the clenched right piledriver. Blair’s camp wanted Prezza to apologise. He wouldn’t. It was self-defence, he justifiably argued. There was even wild talk within Labour HQ of Prescott resigning. Surely a Deputy PM hitting people was a low blow in politics?

No way. The public loved Prescott for it. Sick and tired of yobs frightening good law-abiding folk, here was a politician who stood up for himself and them. Only later did Prescott acknowledge that had the egg thrower been a child or woman, and he’d reacted without seeing his assailant, his career would have ended instantly.

I was to play a role in the only occasion he seriously considered quitting as Deputy PM, a deeply painful 2006 moment for him and especially wife Pauline. The incandescent lorry driving then partner of a civil servant working for Prescott, Tracey Temple, revealed she was having an affair with her boss and there were photographs and a diary as proof.

Prescott never did get on the flight after I called him on his mobile at Heathrow, John not swearing at me double proof. Treading delicately, we agreed a 24-hour pause. He had to speak to Blair and a Pauline he loved before giving the Daily Mirror a statement expressing regret.

The power relationship between employer and employee plus use of Government properties was a genuine public interest justification in disclosing what was also a personal issue. I liked and admired John, I’d dealt with him for years, and understood if he would never speak to me again. A couple of months later, after he’d suffered much taunting, we bumped into each other in Westminster and I braced for a mouthful of abuse.

Instead he invited me into his Commons office full of models of ships he’d served on, gave a fruity comment then resumed talking politics as if I’d never contributed to his public heartache. What a man. What a Labour giant. What a working class hero. RIP