Acknowledgments to Matt of
the Daily Telegraph
Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph 3 May 2006
There have been so many scandals, disgraces and resignations over the course of this Government - and, indeed, of the one that preceded it - that you would have thought every dodgy minister would by now know the form. When something awful happens, they protest their lack of culpability or, if forced to be culpable, the triviality of the offence. They are then hounded until they have to resign. They are damaged far more by the end of this ungainly process than they would have been had they walked the plank at the start of it.
The mess the Government is in now would not have been avoided had these lessons been learnt, but the damage might have been limited. Instead, the nation veers between baying with laughter and seething with contempt at a deputy prime minister who seems to regard the pursuit of casual sexual favours in much the same light as most of us regard the pursuit of pairs of socks.
As a respite from this light entertainment, we then have the spectacle of a home secretary who manifestly feels that neither his own credibility nor that of the administration of which he is a prominent member has been affected by his inability to stop our nation being awash with dangerous criminals who should be far from these shores………….
…………..It is ironic, too, that the morass of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister should have been exposed by his low behaviour towards women. No one should lose his ministerial job for committing adultery, though if public funds were misused to that end that would be a different matter. But it seems that Mr Prescott has for some years used his position in public life to recruit, or attempt to recruit, for carnal purposes women who work for his party or for the Government. We can assume that, in most cases, this was not why those women chose these particular careers.
Geraldine Smith, the Labour MP for Morecambe, says her female backbench colleagues view Mr Prescott's predatory activity with "horror and disbelief". Given what we know to be Tony Blair's views on the rights of women, it is hard to see why his deputy has lasted this long.
In fact, Mr Blair ought really to have sacked him long ago, for a variety of reasons. Mr Prescott has failed at every job he has attempted in the past nine years. His staff, even those he has not propositioned, loathe him and regard him as an oaf and a bully. Whether transport, housing, regional assemblies or environmental issues have been on his agenda, he has made a dog's breakfast of them all.
Keeping this priapic clown in a position that Mr Blair imagined matched his role as the incarnation of Old Labour has cost the taxpayer millions. It has contributed to shambolic misgovernment that has harmed the whole nation. While I have deep sympathy for the women he has harassed, nothing he did to them merits his resignation quite so much as the things he has done to the country.
It is on this that voters ought to reflect tomorrow. After all, if they find local government poor, they can recall that Mr Prescott has, during his miserable career, had much responsibility for it. If their local communities live in fear, the buck stops with Mr Clarke. Not voting Labour allows them to punish these ministers fairly and directly.