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.
What did the commentators say? The "most enduring image" of Prescott is the punch that the once "promising boxer" landed on a protester just before the 2001 general election, said The Times's obituary. 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, said The Guardian. They were both brought up working class, became Labour MPs after coming from the trade union movement, and were "frequently patronised or demonised by Tories and the media, partly on the grounds of class snobbery".
Prescott may have been dubbed "the mouth of the Humber" and known for his commitment to constituencies outside the M25, but his time in the 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? Since Prescott's 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.
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.
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