Pass the sick bag – too much info from Johnny Prezza…
Only two people hit me in my 14 years as an MP. One was Anne Widdecombe and the other, John Prescott – I’ll leave you to judge which was scarier.
Prezza whacked me while I was waiting for a cup of tea and sticky bun in the Members’ Tea Room queue. The Big Man was irked by my reference in the House to his performance at a motor industry dinner (we had one then – a motor industry, I mean) where he had thrown a hissy fit over not being seated at the top table.
That was 1992, just before the election. Prezza was opposition transport spokesman and had been seen tearing a strip off the waiter for seating him at a table which was apparently beneath his dignity.
The fashionable joke among a certain type of Tory MP at the time had been to bray “G and T steward” every time Prescott spoke in the Commons – he had begun life as a cruise ship steward. So after the motor industry dinner debacle, a rather obvious line of faux-sympathy presented itself about Prezza finding himself on the other side of the table etc etc.
All very cerebral – and Prezza’s response was in kind. He sought me out like a rather turgid, but dogged Soviet-era heat-seeking missile.
“You are a f******g Tory c**t – and your mother was a c**t too” was roughly the line he took, before building up to a massive haymaker of a punch, which thankfully glanced off my shoulder before landing its full impact on a sturdy hot water machine which, I’m told, bears a hefty dent to this day.
The saga somehow got onto the front page of The Times, adding to the impression that whatever the shortcomings of John Major’s new regime, Kinnock’s crew were just not up to government – which, of course, was the general aim of the whole Prezza-baiting episode, run by a Tory Whip’s office hit-squad called “Q” under the direction of none other than David Davis.
At the time Prezza was more generally worshiped by the media, a pack of middle-class boys and girls with a collective guilt-thing about proletarian lads like Prezza. And in opposition, of course, it was easy for the Big Man, who just had to turn up to transport disasters and blame it all on the evil, blood-sucking Tories.
I, on the other hand, always knew Prezza was a thick goon. And so it proved when he finally made it into government where he became Tony Blair’s pet-working-class hero - and pretty much single-handedly kept the Tories alive by his performance as deputy-PM.
And it got worse. Not only was he the most hopeless minister in living memory – and God knows there was some tough competition, and I’m not just talking Labour ministers. But then in 2006 the story emerged of the affair with Tracey Temple, his secretary. Already too much information. And now, this!
Dear old Prezza – in so many ways a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong with the brave, new Labour world. Pass the sick bag.
Phillip Oppenheim
