JOHN PRESCOTT’S career, from leaving school at 15 and training as a chef to becoming Britain’s longest serving Deputy Prime Minister, was quite remarkable, with his role as Tony Blair’s working class conscience probably his most important.

He had a pugnacious reputation, cemented when he punched an oafish protestor who smashed an egg on him, but he was thin skinned: self-conscious about his lack of education and his habitual mangling of sentences as his brain raced faster than his mouth.

For all he was an old Labour traditionalist, he had some forward-looking ideas. He was genuine about wanting to regenerate the economy of the north and to that end, in 2004, organised for the North East to hold the first referendum on a regional assembly. His policy had been neutered in Whitehall, which didn’t want to give away power to more local politicians, and so the assembly was made to look like a white elephant by Dominic Cummings, causing the referendum to be lost by 78 per cent to 22, yet the last 20 years have seen politicians trying to reshape his devolution dream so that now we are run by regional mayors.

He wanted to build 200,000 houses a year. He wanted to create an integrated transport policy. His biggest success as a minister was negotiating the 1997 Kyoto climate agreement to reduce global emissions at a time when there was no general belief in the dangers of manmade climate change.

Towards the end of his career, revelations of an affair with his diary secretary 24 years his junior helped tarnish his reputation, but in his 10 years as Deputy Prime Minister he helped Labour to win three successive elections. This was the most successful period in the party’s history and he will be remembered as the authentic glue that held the New Labour coalition together.