Speaker’s Statement

Paul Waugh Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. My condolences to Pauline and all of John’s family at what must be a truly devastating time for them. David used to work in my office, and he sent me a message just after John died. He was very close to his father and saw him as his hero and his friend. We send our condolences to all of them.

I obviously knew John in the House for many years. When he was first elected along with Dennis Skinner, they shared a flat in Clapham. I do not know what went on in that flat, but while they were good friends, they were very different characters. I later learned that after the last vote took place in the House, Dennis and John would both leave to go back to the flat, but they never travelled together. Dennis always made sure that he got there first, so that he could get hold of the one television in the flat, turn it on and watch the darts, the snooker or whatever else. John would turn up and want to watch “Newsnight”, and Dennis refused to change the channel—he would say, “No way. You’ll watch the darts with me.” You can imagine the repartee and the arguments that would have gone on between them, which would have been incredibly funny.

In the 2017 election, John offered to help in any way he could, and he was fantastic. We did several events together. One day, we started in Hull in the morning with the launch of our arts manifesto, and then went on a tour all around Yorkshire and Humberside in the famous bus. John seemed to know the owner of every fish and chip shop in the whole of Yorkshire, and insisted on stopping at every one, so we had a big supply of fish and chips all day long. Then we got to Scarborough, where we were doing a rally in the pavilion by the seafront. John and I got up to speak on the stage, and I do not think a lot of the people there realised that a political rally was going on. They thought they were just there enjoying the sunshine, and then these two guys got up on the stage and started talking.

The people loved John, because he brought out Freddie the fox. We had a long discussion about the evils of foxhunting—the evils of Tory foxhunting. “The Tories are always going to bring back foxhunting. The Tories would kill the fox.” Then he pulled Freddie out of his coat and said, “Look at poor Freddie here. They’re going to tear him apart. That’s what the Tories do to you.” He was loved for all of that.

I want to say thank you to John for what he did, but also to remember that one of the crucial points in his political career was the issue of climate change and Kyoto. It was not easy, popular or normal; a lot of people refused to even consider what we are doing to the natural world and the environment, and how there are limits to what we can do, hence the protocol that John negotiated and signed up to. He was one of the people who was very important in starting to change the global debate about climate change and respect for the natural world and the environment. We should all say thank you to John Prescott for that.

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. The first time I met John Prescott in his role as Deputy Prime Minister was in 1997, when he opened up Admiralty Arch to 60 young homeless people as part of the winter shelter programme. It was a bitterly cold winter, and at the time, the Conservative Back Bencher Crispin Blunt said that this project would be treating a historic building as if it were a “flagship for undesirables”. Given that John was frequently described as an undesirable by many of his opponents throughout his life, he took that as a badge of honour, and he was really proud of that homelessness project. I will never forget the way he shared breakfast with those rough sleepers and took a real interest in every one of their lives. It was a testimony to his compassion, his practical politics, and his unwavering commitment to housing policy. Many millions of council tenants saw home improvements—new windows, new doors and home insulation—and none of them will ever forget that. Those are the basics that many of us take for granted, but which far too many people lacked at the time.

In a superb biography by my late former colleague on The Independent, Colin Brown, naturally entitled “Fighting Talk”, there was a lovely and telling quote from John:

“There are those priests of the Left who want to keep their consciences and there are those who will get their hands dirty. I belong to the dirty hands brigade.”

John was regularly patronised and frequently under-estimated, but he had the last laugh by delivering for real working people. For that, we are all grateful.

[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.