Speaker’s Statement

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. In the last six months of 2005, the United Kingdom took over the rotating presidency of the European Union, and Prime Minister Blair wanted to make a big success of it. One of his concerns was that there was a young British MEP who was prone to behaving very badly in the Chamber and being particularly rude to visiting Heads of State, so John Prescott was sent to see me. He himself, of course, had served as an MEP and was a big project supporter—he loved everything about the European Union—so he came to explain to me that it would be very bad for Britain if I were to stand up and cause a scene when Prime Minister Blair was speaking. I will not say that he threatened me, but I certainly felt deeply intimidated and behaved myself impeccably over the course of the next six months. That was the bruiser John Prescott perhaps.

A couple of years later, on Remembrance Sunday, when the ceremony was over and the parades had finished, I was walking up Whitehall and there, to my astonishment, walking on his own and without any security, was the Deputy Prime Minister. I said hello and wondered what he was doing. John had seen a group of Arctic convoy veterans on the other side of Whitehall. A seafarer himself, he had gone over to speak to the men who had endured such appalling hardship during the last couple of years of the war, and said to them, “I’m going to fight to make sure that you guys get a campaign medal after all these years, recognising what you’ve done.” They did get the medal, and I got the message. I understood why he had been so phenomenally successful from humble roots: he connected, he got on with people and he was very human. We mourn his passing, but perhaps we also mourn the passing of big working-class characters in politics. We need far more of them.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. As you well know, John had many connections with the north-west of England. He went to school on the Wirral. He was a parliamentary candidate in Southport, and he returned there to campaign in the 2017 general election. He was a seafarer out of Liverpool, and he was presented with a trophy by Anthony Eden, whom the Prime Minister mentioned. The trophy was for winning a boxing bout on board ship, and it was there that he honed the craft that may have led to what he was known so famously for later on.

When I came here in 2010, I bumped into John in the Committee corridor, where he was sitting at a desk working. He said he was there because, despite being a former Deputy Prime Minister, he had to share an office with four other Members of the House of Lords—he had recently been ennobled—and he moaned about the fact that there was no preferential treatment for him. However, despite the moan, he was getting on with the job, as John always did.

My favourite story of him is when, during the 2010 election campaign, the battle bus turned up on grand national day outside Aintree racecourse. He had a campaign to keep the grand national free-to-air on terrestrial TV, and there he was with his loudspeakers haranguing the racegoers to come and sign his petition, which they did in droves. Not only did they sign the petition, but they queued in large numbers for selfies with John. That goes to the point about the affection in which he was held, and the impression that John made that day will stay with me forever.

When I came here and was serving in this place, as he was serving in the Lords, he was a source of terrific advice to me, and I am proud to have counted John as a friend over the years. I send my best wishes to Pauline, David and the rest of his family. May John rest in peace.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. When I was elected for Beverley and Holderness in 2005, John Prescott, the MP for neighbouring Kingston upon Hull East, was of course already a legend. He was the word-mangling, fast-fisted former bar steward who had, for the last eight years, been Deputy Prime Minister of this United Kingdom. Hearing the tributes from across the House and all the ways in which that one man was able to influence history and make a difference is, I hope, an inspiration to aspirant working-class politicians all over the country, but also to people in this House.

I knew John from a few years before I entered Parliament. He came to Cambridge for a transport summit, so I organised a demonstration against it and stood outside all day. The day went on and he did not come out. When eventually he did come out, I was just about the only demonstrator left. I immediately berated him and his entourage, and we had a surreal dance around the car park, before he went up to a Jaguar and tried to get in: it was not his. I think it took him quite some time to forgive me for that.

I regularly saw John—as did colleagues from Hull, such as the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), who is sitting on the Government Front Bench—on Hull trains, and he was normally surrounded by papers at a four-place table that he was trying to keep entirely to himself.

Although he was gruff, he was also engaging. He would often come to Beverley, when Pauline would go shopping and he would go to the Royal Standard pub, the finest establishment in Beverley, where he was always very welcome, and people to this day hold him in the highest regard.

As has been remarked, he led our delegation to the COP at Kyoto in 1997, and was widely regarded as the key element in delivering its historic outcome, the first time an international agreement was made to recognise and cut climate emissions. The former US Vice-President Al Gore said that he had

“never worked with anyone in politics…quite like John Prescott.”

John continued to take climate issues seriously, and we would have passionate and rather loud conversations on the train as we went to and fro from east Yorkshire. When I led our delegation to last year’s COP, the first to commit to phasing out fossil fuels, I knew my team and I were following in the footsteps of someone who may have come from a humble background but went on to change the world.