Revealed - What Prescott actually does

Poor old Prescott huh? A moral hypocrite caught with his pants down after slagging all the dirty old men from the Tory Party that did it too? Always being jibed about how he doesn't actually do anything. Well this is not a Soviet style rehabilitation, but I actually think I can - dare I say exclusively - reveal what John Prescott actually does.

Yes, he does do something, at least sometimes I think. That something is that he actually personally writes his written answers to MPs. That is the ones that appear in Hansard. When you see written answers you can tell that they're written by civil servants usually, but when it comes to Prescott's there is always a tone that is, well, Prezza-esque.

OK, it's entirely possible that he has demanded his civil servants write his answers in his style, but it's interesting that the rest of Government responds in a dispassionate non-party political way to questions, whilst Prescott does the complete opposite. For example, yesterday, in response to a question about transport he said,

"Over the past 10 years, this Government have spent 128 billion on transport. After 18 years of neglect, 10 years of investment mean we now have more people travelling on public transport..... We are placing buses at the heart of our transport agenda, to reverse the previous deregulation in 1985 which did so much to damage public transport across the country.

See the reference to "18 years of Tory Rule" and the "deregulation" stuff. No other minister, in written answers, does this.

Incidentally I'm not saying it's wrong, I just thought it was an interesting observation, on the day after he did his last DPM Questions, that written answers always carry of tone of the Prezza-style about them, unlike the rest.