Prescott puts his future above spin

John Prescott weighed in to the education debate today in this article in the Sunday Times, where he criticises proposed reforms as a return to the 11 Plus.

Political commentators have known since 1997 that the only reason that Prescott was given his role as Deputy Prime Minister was to placate the left and to keep him quiet.  Once he was put there, he became impossible to remove because it would have created an extremely powerful critic of the New Labour agenda.

Now it seems Prescott and his political advisers have at last spotted the seed change in the Labour Party and, for the first time, Prescott has chosen not to fall in line with the Spin Machine and instead has spoken for the left.

I suspect that Prescott is changing his tune to protect his own political future.  He has spotted the fact that Blair’s days are numbered and he is, once again, aligning himself with his natural supporters so that Gordon Brown is put in a similar position as Blair in 1997, and thus Prescott will have positioned himself so that his term as the worst Deputy Prime Minister in the history of the Universe has to continue into the Brown era.