Hello and welcome to Not Another One, the podcast with me Steve Richards, Miranda Green, Tim Montgomery and Ian Martin,

the weekend bonus where we kind of relax and reflect a bit.

We thought this weekend we heard the sad news about John Prescott's death on Thursday morning

and there have been a range of fantastic tributes across the political divide as the cliche goes.

And I'm sure we will be referring to him in our discussion and the character I knew him well.

I don't know whether the rest of you did.

But I thought because you'll have heard all those tributes,

we would kind of reflect on some other themes that arise from the reflections on John Prescott,

one of which is how important is being that a party has a deputy,

in opposition, deputy leader, in government, a deputy prime minister.

Tim, what do you think?

Because Kebbynott hasn't really got a deputy leader for example uh stama

has an elected deputy prime minister and playing a similar role as many have commented to john prescott

to blair what's your feeling about this role and whether it is central to an effective form of leadership in a political party.

But it doesn't really have a constitutional or consistent position in the UK.

Willie White Law helped connect Mrs Thatcher to the part of the sort of one-nation tradition

that perhaps she was sometimes insensitive to.

John Prescott, of course, kept new labour in touch

with the working class traditional vote.

And I think, in a way, I'm not a big fan of Kemi,

but I think she'd probably wise not to have yet appointed someone

because it often becomes clearer after, you know, a passage of time,

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