Tony Blair's memoirs paint affectionate portrait of John Prescott

Blair on Prescott: "John Prescott always bought something unique to the Labour party, and to the government. He could be maddening; he could be dangerous; he could be absurd; he could be magnificent. But dull, placid, uneventful and forgettable were words that would never be associated with him." With his "swaggering blunderbuss approach", Tony Blair admits John Prescott could never be described as a "safe pair of hands". If anything, the deputy prime minister was a "brake on New Labour". But he was also an important, authentic link with Labour's union roots, and he had something else that Blair valued: "In a tight spot, I thought you could count on him," he writes. "On the basis of the tiger-shooting analogy (would you venture into the jungle with this person?), he passed muster." The contrast between the two politicians could not have been greater, Blair admits, but he insists the difference was a strength. "If I was very yin, he was certainly thoroughly yang," he admits. Prescott also was not universally loved throughout the party: "It's fair to say that some of those around me came to see him as a liability because he was a rallying point for opposition in the drive for reform." In the early days, Prescott's relationship with Brown – who had backed Margaret Beckett for the deputy leadership role – was "unfortunate". Blair interceded, urging Brown to make peace with Prescott, but reveals that he came to regret doing so. "It's not that John was ever personally disloyal [to me] ... but Gordon pitched his own position on reform in such a way that it was obviously more simpatico with John's, so it changed the constellation of forces around me," he writes. "John also came to the view that Gordon and I were interchangeable as leaders ... He therefore bought the idea that the handover was only fair and right." With the sands so shifted, Blair found that he could no longer count on the support of the deputy prime minister – and also that, by the end of 2006-7, Prescott was "agitat[ing] strongly for me to go". In the spring of 2007, he told Blair that he would resign if the prime minister remained. "He didn't mean it in a disloyal way, and, funnily enough, I didn't take it that way; he just genuinely believed that it was in the interests of the party that Gordon became leader." Blair admits Prescott's inverted snobbery and "old-fashioned" attitudes towards women. "His foibles were usually on the endearing end of the spectrum – though some women I know strongly disagree with that assessment," Blair writes. "He was definitely old-fashioned, not great at working with a certain type of middle-class woman, and though sound on the policy on gay rights was led more by his head than his heart, if you know what I mean. He was also completely paranoid about smart, young well-spoken intellectual types. With these, he was like a pig with a truffle. He could smell out ... a snub at a thousand paces; and once smelt, he would charge after it with quite shocking abandon." Blair reflects on the "whole swathes" of younger advisers "sliced into tiny bits" by Prescott. "It was usually made all the more alarming for them by the fact that they would usually be entirely oblivious as to how they had caused offence." But, he adds, this trait was endearing. "I confess I was highly amused by this, even though I shouldn't have been really," he reveals. "Back in the late 1980s, John ... had been just like that with me ... Though John could be extremely cunning, to say he wore his heart on his sleeve would be a severe understatement. He put the whole body map there. "So there you have him," Blair concludes, "A one-off. Occasionally my bane, more often my support. But genuine, unvarnished and, in the ultimate analysis, true. And in my profession, you can't say better than that."