“When I do die,” said John Prescott as he entered his last decade, “after 50 years in politics, all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales.”
He wasn’t wrong. TV news bulletins, ever the reducers of nuance and detail, showed that clip of him flooring a voter in Rhyl on a loop on Thursday, when the former British deputy prime minister’s death at the age of 86 was announced.
Yet there was always far more to Prescott than this. In particular, Prescott – often dismissed as Two Jags John – was an early pioneer of environmental policies, which dovetailed with his socialist desire to provide for the many, not the few.
He wanted to provide ordinary people with good housing, built to the highest environmental standards, bus services across cities and rural communities, more money for offshore wind power, improve the trains, and increase cycling. These were all policies created through a prism not just of his socialist beliefs, but of the environment and the need to tackle the climate crisis.
He was one of the first to promote home insulation: more than two decades ago he created a grant scheme to improve a home’s energy efficiency and to lower fuel bills, aimed at tackling fuel poverty and the stubbornly high levels of carbon emissions from domestic properties.
Back in 1999, it was Prescott who shone a light on how our water and rivers had become contaminated by pollution. And as delegates attempt to reach an agreement at Cop29 in Azerbaijan this week, to channel funds to developing countries to shift to low-carbon economies, global leaders could do worse than examine Prescott’s legacy of straight talking at climate summits to get results.
An energetic and skilled trade union negotiator as a young man, Prescott was able to use his no-nonsense style and sense of humour to punch through the fog of diplomatic fudging and carve out agreements. As one of the key leaders of the EU delegation at the Kyoto climate conference in 1997, he was widely credited for pulling fractious national representatives together.
Again, his position was forged from his socialism – he wanted a climate deal at Kyoto that put social justice at its very heart, equalising emissions per capita in each country in order to secure the consensus of all nations.
At the summit, he coined a phrase:“I’m walking and talking,” highlighting how he used every minute in every conversation to keep negotiating until, on 11 December 1997, the senior representatives of more than 150 countries agreed binding reductions on carbon emissions.
Twelve years after Kyoto, at the Copenhagen Cop summit in 2009, Prescott kept on walking and talking, no more so than during a gruelling final-night session with huge differences to close between the US and China.
Prescott – then chief negotiator for the EU – “banged heads together”, as Guardian reporter John Vidal later wrote.
In his own recollection of that deal, the former deputy prime minister said he lobbied the former US vice-president, Al Gore, and the Chinese environment minister, Xie Zhenhua, telling them they had to “wriggle more” to get an agreement.
“The translator fell silent, but when I mimed a wriggle to Xie, he smiled and understood what I meant,” he wrote.
The climate scientist Bill Hare said of the news of Prescott’s death, “[He] was a critical force to getting the Kyoto protocol across the line in 1997, bringing together disparate governments to get agreement. He rightfully saw climate change as a threat to working people across the world. A sad day indeed.”
In the years after Kyoto, Prescott fiercely criticised the US – then under the presidency of George W Bush – for undermining it. He continued to be a strong advocate of climate justice, sometimes accusing wealthy industrialised nations of abandoning their responsibility to developing countries in the global south that were far less culpable for emissions but more affected by rising temperatures.
“The rich countries of this world have thrown down the gauntlet to the poorest. They poisoned [developing countries], now they’re trying to strangle them,” he said in 2011.
But Prescott always refused to be made downhearted by the ups and downs of climate negotiations – the two steps forward, three steps back nature of the decisions and discussions.
At the Copenhagen Cop, journalists and delegates spent hours in the queue waiting to enter the conference. It was cold, there was snow on the ground and many participants were frustrated at the long delays and the breakdown in the talks. Some demanded special treatment, but Prescott – then the Council of Europe’s rapporteur on climate change – waited patiently and with good humour.
His optimism, tenacity and clear-sightedness are much needed today.