John Prescott -
Isle of Thanet Gazette 5th May 2006
Having spent the Bank Holiday swilling out sick bowls after our turn at the latest schoolboy bug, I turned for gentle respite to the weekend papers and the diaries of Tracey Temple, mistress of John Prescott, and almost needed the bucket myself. Leaving aside the obvious ugh, yeuch, how-could-she (I guess 250K from the tabloids might help) what I was struck by, was not so much the affair itself (hardly a novelty amongst politicians - even the overweight, slobby ones), or indeed the humiliation for poor Mrs Prescott (I tend to think that women know in their hearts who they are married to, even if their heads deny it, so the fact that her husband apparently spends much of his working day with his hand up a secretary's skirt probably wasn't such a huge revelation) but the girlfriend's detailing of all the staff parties. "The drinks really did flow" she says of one occasion when Prescott and his staff went "back to the office and carried on partying." Another "former lover" talks of "partying and carefree behaviour" and says "the whole place is seething". Regular readers will know I am not above a bit of partying myself - particularly where drinks are flowing - but what I want to know about the deputy Prime Minister's indulgences, is, who is paying for them? I have asked myself this before. My dislike of John Prescott began when New Labour were first elected and he was shown squirting champagne around as though he'd just won a Grand Prix. This is not only a shocking waste (it annoys me when Racing Drivers do it too) but somewhat inappropriate for a member of a supposedly socialist government who has just taken over a country with hundreds of homeless and disturbing levels of child poverty and an awful lot of low-income mothers to whom the amount of money that bottle of fizz cost might have meant the difference to whether or not she lay awake worrying about how she was going to buy her child his next pair of new shoes. Things weren't improved by his two jags, insidious housing policy and total disregard for architecture, aesthetics or the environment. Now we find he is a serial groper too. But frankly, I don't care about that. Whether he shags his assistants, or indeed where he does it (tho if I were one of the seven civil servants who could have allegedly walked into his office while he was enjoying antics with Tracey with the door open, I'd be demanding compensation for the threat to my stomach lining) is for him to decide. I just object to the tax-payer financing his expense account while he's at it...