Two Rotherham lads stick together

PMQs were a day for the deputies today. With Blair in a NZ departure lounge ready to jet off to Indonesia, Prescott and Hague stepped up to the despatch box. David Heath – who bears a passing resemblance to Brian Blessed – did the honours for the Lib Dems too but we don’t really need to hear about him…

Prescottian PMQs may hold a macabre fascination for the Westminster anorak but a large groan – one not even muffled by the engine noise of two Jags - must surely emanate from the assembled throng of visitors when they realise their cherished public gallery tickets aren’t going to get them access to the headline act but rather to the teenage garage band who just turned up to play on the undercard…it would be like paying to see the Rolling Stones and getting the Flaming Furnaces…

PMQs with Prescott usually promises a rather different kind of political event to that provided by the usual question time with Blair. The anticipation of the usual ‘punch and judy’ routine is replaced by a different expectation, one of an altogether bloodier spectacle – Prescott single-handedly murdering the English language. It is ‘car-crash’ telly…it may be too awful to watch but, at the same time, you can’t bring yourself to turn away. Prescott’s jarring sentences sometimes feel a little like watching a learner driver crunch through the gears but he gets there in the end. Sometimes. Of course, this has now become something of a Westminster tradition, one eagerly anticipated by the Parliamentary sketchwriters, but today's proceedings did actually deviate a little from the usual script.

Prescott stumbled a little at the start of PMQs but he still felt confident enough to affect a spirit of solidarity with his opposite number. “Us Rotherham lads must stick together” said the Member for Hull East. This apparent bonhomie quickly disappeared, however, when Hague baited Prescott about his one-time failure to pay council tax on a grace-and-favour property. Hague linked this in with an attack on the Government for dropping the £200 council tax rebate for pensioners. Prescott struggling to reply as only he can gave a typically garbled answer, putting words together in a manner suggesting a rather avant-garde approach to both sentence construction and intelligibility.

Hague moved in for the kill at this point and, with a line likely to have been rehearsed for several days beforehand, said (of Prescott's reply) that there was, "so little English in that answer, President Chirac would have been proud of it".

Cue hoots of laughter from the Tory benches. But this was the red-rag to the proverbial bull and, aside from a temporary recurrence of verbal wrestling, this sent Prescott into what turned out to be a pretty effective attack-mode. From this point he largely got the better of Hague. Prescott struck back by saying that while he took the blame for getting his grammar wrong, he would sooner get his words wrong than get his judgement wrong, reminding Mr Hague that he had once described Tory peer Lord Archer as a man of "integrity".

While fired up and clearly riled by Hague’s comments, Prescott also, paradoxically, seemed to relax into the role of PM for the day. When being faced by a closed question – a question tabled in advance on a specific issue – he looked around for the civil servant prepared brief in his folder and said, “closed questions…oh yeah”, mocking his own apparent lack of a quick-fire response on the question. Prescott even managed to reply playfully to Hague’s reference of his 2001 jab, “I thought we had finished with Punch and Judy politics. I know I'll be called Mr Punch, but where do you think that leaves you?"

JP wasn’t finished either, he mentioned about how well everyone had done under a Labour government, including the Honourable Member (Mr. Hague), whose speaking fees somewhat outstrip Prescott’s, and then completed his recovery by telling Hague “Have I got news for you”…another reference to Hague’s outside interests.

All in all, Prescott seemed to come out pretty well for what must be a tough gig for him. What the great British public made of it remains to be seen but John, at least, should sleep well tonight.