How John Prescott got the better of me

I’ve had the pleasure of doing a column for the News of the World for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I’ve had the newspaper’s title on my conference pass. I wish I’d done it earlier. It seems to drive Labour people quite mad. The ushers here recoil when they check my pass, some tut, others hiss. “Is that newspaper still going?” one of them asked me on the way in. Um yes, it’s the largest selling newspaper in the English-speaking world and its readers are the type who tend to decide British elections. The sort of people whom Labour seems to have given up on, as it indulges itself in the kind of pre-Kinnock policies which proved rather less than popular in the 1980s. Tax the rich, spend spend spend, etc. Listening to the debates here, I can see why the Blairites are so nervous.