Former deputy prime minister and transport minister John Prescott has died at the age of 86.
His family said he had been living in a care home, and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
John Prescott was the son of an LMS signalman and was born in Prestatyn in 1938. He left school when he was 15 to work as a trainee chef and then as a steward on the Cunard Line.
Although he had failed the eleven-plus examination, he later graduated from Ruskin College and the University of Hull.
He was elected MP for Kingston upon Hull East on 18 June 1970, and continued to represent that constituency until 12 April 2010.
His main influence on transport policy came after he had been appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions by the new Prime Minister Tony Blair on 2 May 1997. The breadth of his responsibilities inspired the nickname of ‘Prescott’s super-ministry’, but he spent a lot of his time on transport matters.
In June 1998 he rescued the failing Channel Tunnel Rail Link, telling MPs: ‘When I had the chance to examine the details of the deal put in place by the previous Government, I was appalled … Even this week I was asked to find £100 million to pay for specially designed sleeper trains which do not work, have never been used, and are now lying idle in a field.’
He oversaw the creation of a new public private partnership to complete the project after four months of talks, and construction continued. The first section opened in Kent in 2003 and Britain’s first high speed line was opened throughout four years later.
In July 1998 he published a White Paper entitled ‘A new deal for transport’, and this was followed in November 1999 by improvements to railway safety in the wake of the Ladbroke Grove train crash, which included the nationwide installation of TPWS and the launch of the confidential reporting system CIRAS. The following month he published a Ten Year Plan for Transport, and was also responsible for a new Transport Act which received Royal Assent in December 2000, creating the Strategic Rail Authority.
He was made a Life Peer in July 2010, after Labour had lost 91 seats in the General Election in May, resulting in a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
He could be hot-tempered, as was demonstrated by the famous egg-throwing incident in Rhyl in May 2001, when Prescott, who had won several boxing matches in his youth, punched a protestor who had thrown an egg at him.
There had been no punches in 2000 at East Croydon, but he clashed verbally with an elderly lady who effectively gate-crashed a tram launch event on 6 April, telling Prescott that trams were hopeless and dangerous, and that he should not have allowed them to return. On that occasion the protestor won the day, because Prescott angrily abandoned a question session with the media and left the scene abruptly, leaving the reporters to quiz the old lady instead.
John Prescott is survived by his wife Pauline and their sons Jonathan and David.
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott, 31 May 1938–20 November 2024