There was more to John Prescott than his working class roots

John Prescott has died, leading to a flood of tributes and comments about the working class hero of the New Labour project. That framing of Prescott is good for headlines but the reality was inevitably more complicated than that. It’s too shallow and narrow to describe Prescott as the lone working class voice in an essentially middle class political enterprise. 

Was Prescott really working class? Not in his own words. As early as 1996, before he became deputy prime minister, he said he no longer regarded himself as working class: ‘I was once, but by being a Member of Parliament, I can tell you, I’m pretty middle class.’

He was quite right in that, of course. Someone who earns a salary that’s significantly above the national average, for doing work that involves talking and writing, surely can’t be described, without qualification, as ‘working class’.