THE tributes have for have been pouring for political heavyweight and man of the people, John Prescott (aka Baron Prescott of Kingston upon Hull), who passed away last week aged 84.

His reputation was of a man singularly able to cut through the usual Westminster crap using the unvarnished spade of mangled syntax and the blunt shovel of malapropisms as his tools.

Homeless seamen were forced to live in “hostiles,” industrial disputes could be sorted through “meditation,” and the New Labour mission was to “go back now, forwards, back to full employment.” Absolute gibberish, of course, but we knew what he was on about, at least most of the time.

The obituaries homed in on his earthy roots; we had lost the last of an endangered species, an unreconstructed proletarian beast who’d preferred eating red meat to vegetables unless they were peas off his knife.

Saying that, he could rustle up word salads that the Old Labour union leaders would snaffle up just as readily as the gout-riddled shire Tories of the CBI.

And aitches weren’t the only thing Prescott was famous for dropping. While his vocabulary sometimes missed the target, his fists were a different story.

As every report of his death delighted in mentioning, he once belted a protester with a lightning-fast left hook that Mike Tyson would have bitten his ear off for in his prize fight with influencer Jake Paul the other week. Like all true horny-handed sons of toil, he was good with his hands.

All of the assorted outpourings cited his working-class background as his unique selling point in British politics.

“What a character,” “Salt of the earth,” “A one-off, the likes of which we’ll never see again,” or words to that effect. He was painted as a lovable bit of rough among Westminster’s well-to-do diamonds.

Take Radio 4’s Today programme, a show so cosy and middle class it makes the Archers sound like the Joe Rogan Podcast. In their tribute, Prescott’s working classness was discussed as if it were a fascinating novelty, like a talking parrot or a monkey that can blow smoke out of its arse. Tony Blair described him as “definitely the most unusual [person] I’ve ever met,” and he met Robert Mugabe!

From presenters Amol Rajan and Nick Robinson’s condescending eulogy, you would been forgiven for thinking that being working class was nothing more than a quaint characteristic or quirky personality trait rather than an economic classification to which over 50 per cent of the population identify. I thought they were talking about a rare Faberge egg, not a stroppy bloke from Hull.

Without getting too Dave Spart about it, shouldn’t his working-classness and his accent be the least interesting things about him?

When a Cabinet minister with a working-class upbringing is more of an oddity in public life than Old Etonians like Boris Johnson or David Cameron, then we are in big trouble.

However much of a parody of a northern working-class bloke Prescott became, downing pints of gravy for the local whippet refuge, breeding racing pigeons from his subsidised flat in Admiralty Arch and campaigning for cloth caps to be mandatory headgear for everyone north of the Watford Gap, in a democracy, he and his like should be a more common sight around Westminster than the inbred circus of upper-class grifters and spineless technocrats that populate the modern political landscape.

Prezza could be a buffoon, but how he spoke was nowhere near as ridiculous as, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg — a man whose anachronistic accent is shared by no-one bar perhaps the snootier elements of the aristocracy. Yet Rees-Mogg commands a level of respect from broadcasters and journos that Prescott’s brogue, shared by millions, never enjoyed.

Instead, Prescott is caricatured as the political version of Brian Glover’s PE teacher in the film Kes, knocking heads together and dispensing his own brand of no-nonsense windbag wisdom, whether you wanted it or not.

Blair loved Prescott and championed him as the Old Labour class warrior who kept him in check on behalf of the left of the party. In reality, his role was to use his reputation as the loveable, straight-talking Peter Kay of Parliament to provide cover for New Labour’s profoundly un-working-class project.

The salty old seadog was central to ensuring that the good ship New Labour tacked starboard. The purser turned gamekeeper.

Gordon Brown described Prescott as a “working-class hero,” but he was nothing of the sort. He was, in fact, the hero of the emerging liberal elite, on a mission to make the Labour Party a vehicle for their centrist, middle-class values.

He was the poster boy for social mobility, the well-offs’ self-aggrandising barometer of success. A lad from nothing who shinned his flabby backside up the greasy pole to escape the indignity of his roots with his accent intact. From waiter on a cruise liner to the House of Lords in 40 years.

His inability to string a sentence together wasn’t always the hallmark of his style and had nothing at all to do with his working-class roots. He was an extremely intelligent and articulate political thinker in his union days.

No, the fudge and bluster were political, the result of trying to face two ways at once. The “say one thing, do another” doublespeak that characterised the New Labour project was the real reason the poor bloke would get tongue-tied.

If you’re the “working-class hero” remembered by Brown, how do you explain dumping Labour’s core commitment to public ownership of industry, or defend oxymoronic policies like public-private partnership? How do you square the circle of Labour’s famous “ethical foreign policy?” It would be enough to leave a linguistic gymnast like Stephen Fry scrambling for words.

The bruff, Yorkshire foghorn routine was what Prescott was there to do. Like an out-of-work actor dressed as a Dickensian urchin at the London Dungeons Experience, the cosplay Les Dawson schtick was the job.

And it worked, distracting the left of the party from the more unpalatable parts of the New Labour project and reassuring traditional working-class voters that Blair understood their concerns. Spoiler: he didn’t, and working-class voters deserted Labour in their millions.

In a barnstorming speech to the Labour conference back in September 1993, Prescott backed plans that narrowed the chances of working-class candidates like himself ever making it into Parliament, arguing in favour of weakening the influence of local union branches over the selection of candidates.

This change in Labour’s constitution allowed the leadership clique to begin parachuting in their approved candidates at the expense of talented local activists. Activists who sounded like the people they were supposed to be representing. Now there’s a novel idea.

Steve Parry is a comedy writer, performer and political activist  —  follow him on X @stevejparry.