Mostly Harmless

When thinking of a bully in the Cabinet, John Prescott usually sprung to mind. That was until this week, when the bulemic Prescott published his memoirs on his time in the Labour government.

John Prescott urged Tony Blair to sack Gordon Brown but the prime minister was “scared” of his chancellor, he has claimed in his memoirs. In the book, serialised in the Sunday Times, Mr Prescott says he also urged Mr Brown to stand down and fight Mr Blair from the backbenches. The former deputy prime minister said Mr Blair reneged on several promises to resign in favour of Brown. But he describes the current PM as “annoying, bewildering and prickly”. He says Mr Brown would sulk silently in meetings so often they had to be abandoned, while on other occasions, he could “go off like a bloody volcano.”

Mr Prescott adds that he brokered “hundreds” of reconciliation meetings and phone calls between Brown and Blair. And he claims that the then chancellor of the exchequer kept money back from Tony Blair’s “pet” projects in order to give himself more money to play with once he became prime minister.

The memoirs are hardly surprising on a number of levels - there have been well-founded rumours for the last decade that Brown and Blair struck a deal pre-1997 whereby Blair would be replaced as Prime Minister by Brown. It is even less surprising to find such a damning portrayal of Brown given the authorship - Prescott evidently has never been a huge fan of Gordon Brown, perhaps because there’s only room for one bully in the present Cabinet.

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