LORD PRESCOTT

SIMILARLY TO AN ISSUE I DEALT with four years ago in relation to John Prescott then being the “Deputy Prime Minister”, I am concerned about whether I agree with the fact that a decent working-class ex-waiter should accept a position in the House of Lords simply because “her at home wants t’be a lady”. Mr John Prescott was an excellent MP and a decent deputy PM, despite being criticised for having an affair with a woman (nowadays it would be acceptable if he had been fooling about with another man).

ON AFFAIRS, HOWEVER, MY TAKE IS why on earth any decent gentleman should be remotely concerned about how many affairs with a secretary another gentleman has or does not have. But perhaps there is the rub: gentlemen may be forgiven for having the occasional glass of Port after work in the company of a secretary, and if one has one too many and if this leads to what is vulgarly called “sex” then this is all well and good as long as the gentleman does not tell anyone about it and the secretary does not ask for money.

INDEED, IN A SENSIBLE WORLD THIS SORT OF ACTIVITY would be compulsory. After all, everyone benefits in the end: the gentleman gets more value for money from his employee – and everyone knows that secretarial wages are a scandal nowadays – and the secretary benefits from close contact with refined, upper-class manners and visits to decent restaurants in Juan-les-Pins or Avignon perhaps, before she goes on to get married to, say, an insurance representative and settles down in Wolverhampton.

HOWEVER, THINGS CANNOT BE SEEN THROUGH the same prism when we are dealing with a member of what is laughingly called the working class. One cannot but cringe at the thought of the smell of tripe, black pudding and brown ale during a kiss, or candlelit dinners in wine bars in Putney, or the flat, twangy northern declarations of affection, using words like “lass”, or, perish the thought, copulation in the dark, which, I am reliably informed, often takes place among people who buy their underwear in supermarkets.

EVEN SO, PRESCOTT DESERVES his nobility simply for the fact that one of the highlights of an incredibly dull period of politics over the last ten years or so was the sight of the Right Hon. Member “duffing over”, as he would no doubt put it, one of those irritating hooligans who find amusement in insulting their superiors during political campaigns on a visit to some unpronounceable settlement in North Wales. I have watched with extreme horror while protesters have hurled eggs, flour and tomatoes at decent chaps who, nonetheless, have remained passive, yet all the time wished to move in with a stout hickory crop and give these unwashed curs a good thrashing. But, fortunately we have an obedient police force in England and Wales, so no doubt a thrashing is administered behind closed cell doors by blue-clad johnnies wearing what is termed “body armour” today.