Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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Radio 4. Oh, My cast away this week is Lord Prescott.

Deputy Prime Minister for 10 years, he had a central role and a unique style. Henry Cooper crossed with

Claire Rayner just about covers it. He was the agony aunt in the fraught Downing Street

relationship between Blair and Brown and he didn't shy away from connecting with the

voters famously landing a punch on the jaw of a protester. His political

beginnings are rooted in Union activism and even further back there are hints of the man he would become as a boy he played the part of grumpy in a school production of Snow White.

He says for the last 40 years my routine has centered around Parliament which is strange I suppose as I

never had any ambitions to be a politician John Prescott can that surely be true given

the heights to which arose within the political hierarchy you never had the

ambition to be a politician. My ambition was to be a trade union official in my own

union, the National Union of Seaman but I don't think they want to be anywhere in

the leadership. So in a way I then chose a little bit of education. I went to

whole university. The MP retired and the union encouraged me to become a

member parliament.

I'm wondering then because you didn't start out with the idea of going into politics

and certainly not with rising to the top of politics.

Have you always felt something of an outsider even when you've been at the heart of Westminster?

A bit, I think it's more to do with an inferiority complex.

Nobody can understand that perhaps you've gone this far that you can have an inferiority complex but all the

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