John Prescott was the embodiment of old Labour

The death of Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the age of 86 also marks the passing of the old Labour party.

Prescott was a bruiser both in the physical and the political sense. He was unashamedly working class, contemptuous of the effete intellectuals who had taken over Labour, and ready to hit out at the party’s enemies with both fists and tongue.

Prescott will be most remembered for the moment during the 2001 general election campaign when his left hook connected with the jaw of a 29-year-old protester, Craig Evans, who had thrown an egg at him as Prescott arrived at an election meeting at Rhyl in his native Wales.

Evans was not seriously hurt, and the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair laughed off the incident as ‘John being John’. But Prescott’s gut reaction was perhaps a symbolic watershed moment in the transformation of Labour from being the organised arm of the working-class trade union movement to the middle-class party of white-collar public service employees we all know today.