A bit of a bruiser

The great marriage guidance counsellor has died—John Prescott, that is, who valiantly sought to uphold the Blair/Brown wedding vows, a subject he occasionally alluded to in Parliamentary Labour Party meetings. He may also be remembered for brokering the Kyoto climate change deal (at least he took credit for it). Signatories to that deal continued to increase carbon emissions, but at least they said they would reduce them. I wonder if John revelled in the way the media sneered at him. For some time he refused to talk to the Hull Daily Mail. Then there was the time he and wife Pauline took a limo from the Grand Hotel in Brighton to the conference centre a few hundred yards away, allegedly so Pauline’s hair wouldn’t get messed up in the wind. The media delight was as much old fashioned sneering as it was misogyny. He was to his credit no great fan of Mandy, comparing him publicly at one point to a crab. His first run at the deputy leadership was based on his avowed intention to get the party campaigning and recruiting one million members. That was a laugh. His constituency, East Hull was pretty comatose, and it was often said it had more members in the cemetery than alive. But he was a tub thumper of an old school before the age of social media. Very much analogue. I think his ratings went up when he thumped the egg thrower. The moral being don’t throw an egg at an ex-boxer—perhaps that’s a metaphorical summation.