John Prescott: was he Labour's last link to the working class?

Tributes have flooded in after the family of John Prescott announced his death, aged 86, from complications arising from Alzheimer's disease.

The former trade unionist and MP for Kingston upon Hull East was Tony Blair's deputy prime minister from 1997 to 2007, making him Britain's longest-serving deputy PM. He played "a key role" in the 'New Labour' rebrand of the Labour Party, said the BBC.

There was "no one quite like him in British politics", Blair told the broadcaster. The sentiment was echoed by other Labour party grandees. "He was a total one-off, bigger than life," wrote Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director, in The European. He was "remarkable", said home secretary Yvette Cooper in her tribute, calling him "fierce and warm-hearted".

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What did the commentators say?

The "most enduring image" of Prescott will always be the punch that the once "promising boxer" landed on a protester just before the 2001 general election, said The Times's obituary. But this "bearlike figure with a trademark suspicious scowl" was also "one of the most powerful people in Britain for a decade".

A working-class former cruise ship steward, Prescott was "a man unambiguously of the left". The grandson of a Welsh miner "convinced his comrades to follow him to the centre" of the political ground and unite behind Blair, "the smooth, Islington-based barrister of whom much of the rank and file of the party were deeply suspicious".

That's just one of the reasons Prescott is often compared to the current deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, noted The Guardian. They were both brought up working class, became Labour MPs after working in the trade union movement, and were "frequently patronised or demonised by Tories and the media, partly on the grounds of class snobbery".

Prescott was "much mocked by the Conservative press for his enjoyment of the fruits of power", said historian Nigel Jones in The Spectator.

The media nicknamed him 'Two Jags' after it emerged he had two Jaguar cars, despite his push for use of public transport. The "last giant of old Labour" was also forced to give up the use of Dorneywood, the Buckinghamshire mansion usually reserved for the deputy prime minister, after photos of him playing croquet during working hours sparked outrage.

Rayner has already "lost the battle" for the "magnificent grace-and-favour mansion", said the Daily Mail, being passed over for Chancellor Rachel Reeves. She was also forced to announce that she would no longer accept free clothes, after Labour's first months in power were rocked by revelations that the prime minister and senior cabinet members had all accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of gifts from donors.

That might be part of the reason the public perception of Labour as a working-class party has plummeted. This September, the number of people who responded that Labour is "not very close" to the working class increased to 23%, according to a YouGov survey: a decade-long high.

Since Prescott's New Labour era, Labour has indeed become a "less distinctively working-class party", said Oliver Heath, politics professor at Royal Holloway University, and LSE research officer Laura Serra, on The Conversation. The size of the "class gap" – the difference between the number of working-class Labour voters and the number of middle-class ones – has declined.

And it's not just voters; party membership is "now heavily skewed to young, middle-class Londoners whose priorities are elsewhere", said Paul Collier, professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, in The New Statesman.

You can also see it in policy: in Rachel Reeves' recent budget, the "lobbying of the private-equity mafia" in London's financial centre "scared Reeves off serious tax increases".

And while the poorer half of households face a 0.8% cut in their annual income, according to estimates by the Resolution Foundation, the "business model" of the party "continues to be managed decline anywhere beyond London".

Prescott may have been dubbed 'the mouth of the Humber' and known for his commitment to constituencies outside the M25, but his time in ascendancy came "just as Labour decided to tip its cap to the mewling, identity-obsessed, middle class", said Rod Liddle in The Spectator. But in the end, his "pugnacious left-wing zeal diminished to almost nothing".

What next?

Prescott's family thanked the NHS doctors and nurses who cared for him after his stroke in 2019, and the "dedicated staff at the care home where he passed away".

"As you can imagine, our family needs to process our grief, so we respectfully request time and space to mourn in private," their statement said.