Jackie Danicki

And rightfully, gloriously so. I will always read any Barber interview, because she is blunt enough to call it the way she sees it - and shrewd enough to see it correctly, most times. So it is with former deputy prime minister John Prescott, who always did strike me as one of the biggest class bores in Britain (which is saying something, since the place seems to be full of them). Barber confirms this, and goes deeper, in an interview to promote his new BBC special on - what else? - class:

A lot of what he blames on class - like the fact that Blair almost never invited him to dinner at Number 10 or Chequers - I think has a much simpler explanation. You wouldn’t want to invite Prezza to dinner not because he might eat peas with his knife, but because he would bore the other guests to death. When he starts on one of his needy, self-pitying rants about class, there is absolutely no deflecting him. Moreover, his vision of class, where downtrodden salt-of-the-earth mill hands groan under the lash of wicked heartless mill owners, bears no relation to modern Britain. All his ideas seem to derive from three texts he read at Ruskin College in the Sixties - Karl Marx, of course, but also Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, both of which date from the Fifties. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that society has changed since then. He still imagines the working class saving up for their annual Wakes Week trip to Blackpool; it is left to the Earl of Onslow in the TV programme to break it to him that nowadays his gamekeeper takes holidays in South Africa.

Yes, he went to Ruskin College at Oxford, became deputy prime minister, owns many lavish homes and cars, and still moans about how being working class has hampered him in life. Indeed, Prescott seems on course to join the House of Lords - what a travesty of “social justice”! (Barber: “I bet we’ll end up with the spectacle of Lord Prescott in ermine banging on about how his working-class origins have held him back.”)

I’d like to see his show, though, as it sounds so horrifically cringeworthy. Any chance this is all an elaborate joke being played on him by the Beeb?

There is a hilarious scene when Prezza is taken to meet three chavs, and asks the producer en route what chav means. She defines it as meaning ‘council house and violent’ (news to me) but anyway, the girls he meets say they’re not chavs, they’re middle-class. ‘You can’t call me working class,’ says one unanswerably, ‘Cos I don’t work.’ Prezza is sweetly puzzled by these girls, who run rings round him intellectually, but what is impressive is his desire to understand them. He really wants to get to the bottom of their problems. One of them says she got kicked out of school for violence. ‘Someone attacked you?’ he asks. No, she explains patiently, she attacked the teacher.

David Brent has nothing on John Prescott.

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