FactCheck: Prezza pulls his punches?

The former deputy PM John Prescott is famous for mangling his syntax - but does his autobiography mangle the facts?

"If that's a contradiction, then that's me, a mass of contradictions. My life has been full of them."

So says John Prescott at the end of his autobiography. FactCheck looked at whether the contradictions added up.

Probably the single most famous Prescott moment: on the campaign trail in May 2001, an egg gets chucked at the deputy PM, and he retaliates with a swift left hook.

According to his diary, press handler Alastair Campbell "felt instinctively there would be a lot of support for JP, but also that he should say he wished he hadn't responded like that."

Prescott, however, was having none of the sorry malarkey, and stuck by his self-defence.

And the public, he reckons, were on his side. "Instead of viewers ringing Sky and demanding I should resign, they were saying, 'Hurrah for Prescott, good on you, John, about time someone gave these violent protestors a taste of their own medicine'," is how Prescott remembers things.

But the endorsements weren't all quite that ringing, according to Campbell's account. "In all the vox pops, men seemed to be fine, women less so," he notes on 17 May 2001. "It was the same internally".

Back in the days when New Labour was all cool Britannia and champagne receptions with the stars, Prescott and a small entourage went to the Brit Awards - and got a soaking from renegade singer Danbert Nobacon.

"The incident was in the papers the next day, with pictures of me looking furious, but they all said what the photos showed - that I'd managed to keep cool and not react," Prescott notes. "Little did they know."

As his book tells, he'd actually stepped up in anger to avenge the wet women in his party, including his wife Pauline.

The Chumbawamba singer had "emptied a big bucket of ice-cold water over us all... I lashed out with my fist, into his ribs. I hit him so hard he fell off the table. I then stood up, about to press my foot on his throat... when I realised the photographers had arrived."

Prescott regained his composure just in time to avoid the flashguns.

His retaliation went unreported and the press was largely on his side, with the Daily Mirror even giving Nobacon an ice-dousing of its own.

The impression of calm was, perhaps, handy given that within less than a month, Prescott was threatening legal action over an allegation that he had, well, punched someone - in this case ex-Tory MP and gossip columnist Jerry Hayes.

Punch magazine, which had printed the claim, received a letter from Prescott's solicitors, asking for an apology and retraction. The magazine mounted a robust defence, devoting four pages of the magazine and the cover to Prescott.

Not so, says Wyatt, who has a rather different memory of the whisky-sponsored Spectator awards do in 1989.

"At the reception beforehand, [Prescott] grabbed at the glasses of whisky as if they were the last in the world," she wrote earlier this month. "I had been delegated to sit next to him, and by the time lunch commenced he was already drinking the free bottle of whisky in front of each name card.

"Moreover, he knew my name perfectly well as he picked up my card and read it aloud."

Back up for Wyatt comes from The Telegraph's David Hughes, who claims it was in fact he who encouraged Prescott to get stuck into the whisky. " 'It would be churlish not to partake' " he ventured. "And partake we did".

After bonding over the water of life, the pair went back to the house of commons - Prescott to stagger drunkenly into a shadow cabinet meeting - where they "parted company as the very best of friends," though have yet to speak again, wrote Hughes last week.

A rather sozzled memory Prescott's may be, but he should still be able to tell a Petronella from a David. Or at least, so you'd hope.

The premier and deputy's most heated argument was over then-shadow minister Harriet Harman's decision to send her kids to private school, Prescott reckons - although from Blair's point of view he notes it was "piddling".

The term "row" is debatable - and Blair was a famously confrontation-avoiding PM. But shouldn't someone perhaps jog Prezza's memory to a June 2002 bust-up he recounted a mere 100-odd pages previously?

"I got really annoyed when I read about some policy away-day held in a country house ... Blair and Brown had attended but I hadn't," he writes. "I was determined to have real go at them this time, not just on my behalf but for generally ignoring the whole cabinet."

With the cabinet assembled, Prescott "laid into Tony" about the need to discuss policy in cabinet rather than leak it to the press.

"I could see Tony was getting angry with me, but I kept on going," he says of the row. Or non-row, depending on whose definition we're going on.

In fact, as Alastair Campbell saw it, Prescott had "waged war" on Blair - although things were smoothed over in a couple of days.

"Four homes" Prescott gives a rather, well, contracted description of the events surrounding his leaving the super-cheap flat he rented for many years from his long-standing union, the National Union of Seamen (later part of the RMT).

As well as his two grace and favour deputy PM pads, Dorneywood and Admiralty House, he kept on the rent-controlled flat as an "extra London base if Labour were to lose power or if I were to stop being a minister".

All in all, these three homes, plus his family house in Hull, made him an easy target for less well-housed critics.

Prescott left the RMT in 2002, and was asked to leave the Clapham flat in the spring; both sides dug their heels in and the lawyers got involved. In November 2003, the matter was concluded privately out of court.

Understandably, these wrangles are not something Prescott rakes over in his book - instead he lambasts the "tabloid myth" of stories about his living it up at the taxpayer's expense, and notes simply that the "hassle and nonsense" around the flat all got too much.

The number of jobs under Labour has blossomed to a record level - although the population has grown too, so quoting a simple figure isn't that meaningful in itself.

Still, the employment rate is higher, and the unemployment rate lower, than when he party came to power.

And Prescott squeezed out of office just before the credit crunch started to bite - so we'll let the low inflation and sound, growing economy claims pass without too highly raised an eyebrow. Just this once.

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