John Prescott was ‘heart’ of New Labour, says Lord Mandelson

Lord Mandelson: New Labour would not have been what it was, and it certainly would not have been so successful, without John Prescott. I mean, that’s the main point. Sometimes people talk about him as if he were sort of out with New Labour or an add-on to New Labour. He was absolutely at the heart of it because the essence of New Labour was building a coalition between our aspiring working-class supporters, rooted in Labour’s history and values, and more middle-class voters, professional, university-educated voters. And he was therefore a cornerstone of that electoral coalition.
Ciaran Jenkins: So Tony Blair once said that John Prescott kept the whole New Labour show together. But it wasn’t always that way, was it? At the start he thought of Blair and Brown and maybe you as well as the beautiful people. Did you realise at the time how much you needed him?
Lord Mandelson: He did. I’d forgotten that. He did call us the beautiful people and he thought he was, you know, he sort of stepped aside, rather relegated himself as, you know, as an un-beautiful person. But that was not the point. The point was what he stood for. I mean, the sense of purpose he brought to politics, also his intellect. He was a highly intelligent individual. He was a politician to his fingertips. So he would decry slightly, you know, spin and soundbites and photo opportunities and whatever. Actually, he was very well versed and very well trained in all those things. He was a thoroughly professional politician.
Ciaran Jenkins: And he had humour as well, didn’t he? And he had wit and he knew how to have a dig. And he once held up a crab in a glass.
TV footage of John Prescott holding glass jug and saying: Me and my mate Peter.
Lord Mandelson: Nobody understood why he did it, but it didn’t really matter because although oftentimes people didn’t understand fully what he was saying or why he was doing something, the message nonetheless was clear. And on that occasion he was having a dig at me and everyone knew he was. So it really didn’t matter, you know, what was lost in translation. The fact is they knew that I was the target of this and the dig, the target, was duly lampooned and landed.
Ciaran Jenkins: There was a lot of snobbery, wasn’t there, about him, especially in the 90s. I mean, to what extent was he aware of that and what did he make of it?
Lord Mandelson: There was some some snobbery. I mean, the Tories were pretty condescending. They were pretty patronising towards him. I must say, it amuses me to hear all these Tories now sort of lauding him as a political giant. That’s not how they treated him at the time. But to an extent, you know, John also played this up a bit and he liked to be a bit of the underdog. He liked to be, you know, the working-class guy who was sort of battling through and fighting for attention amongst the sort of London metropolitan middle-class media.
That was part of, you know, who he was. That was part of the defining of himself. I don’t think there was snobbery about him. I think people felt he was a real player and indeed had been a player for a very long time. And right up to the last knockings. I mean, before Tony Blair stood down and John himself resigned in 2007. You know, he was playing a pretty important role, keeping the whole New Labour project on the road.