Mr Prescott volunteered that instead of that old story it might be

Mr Prescott volunteered that instead of that old story it might be of more interest to the readers for the paper to focus on his imminent speech on transport. What on earth is Mr Satchu supposed to do?
Perhaps, as every world-weary observer has immediately assumed, it really was a case of Downing Street spin doctors briefing against Prescott via the Sunday papers, only to find him biting back tenaciously the following day. If so, the explanation for what happened – more cock-up than conspiracy – is unusually imaginative and plausible for a cover story, particularly as it comes from quarters close to the man himself.The story is that the Deputy Prime Minister happened to be talking to a very senior editorial executive at The Sunday Times about a mildly embarrassing story concerning his son’s land-dealing in Hull over two years ago, a matter in which his own role, as it happens, was entirely honourable. Time, you might have thought, for Mr Satchu to slot in an image of Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, the personable media tycoon and Labour minister who the stories announced would henceforth be taking charge. Then, lo and behold, Mr Prescott (in The Independent) and Lord Macdonald both announce that is not the case, that nothing much has changed and that the peer will simply be acting as a managing director reporting to the “executive chairman”, Mr Prescott, just like his other ministerial lieutenants. After all, anyone reading the newspapers would quickly have come to the conclusion that Mr Prescott no longer has any responsibility for transport.

But Samir Satchu, the website’s enterprising founder, who dreamt up the site while stuck in a stifling carriage at East Putney in the summer, has a problem, namely, whether Mr Prescott is the right man to feature at all. Prominent on the already popular website are an unflattering cartoon of John Prescott and a digital petition calling on the Deputy Prime Minister to travel by Tube on four consecutive days, in return for which a pounds 5,000 donation will be paid to a charity of his choice. My knowledge is limited to the brilliant No 94 from Trowbridge to Bath. There is only so much that an investigative journalist can know.. AFTER AN operatically bad 90-minute journey that should have taken at most 35 minutes yesterday – no eastbound Central Line trains because of points failure at White City, famine of eastbound Circle Line services, protracted wait followed by evacuation of Jubilee Line train at Waterloo because of unspecified fault – may I be among the first to extend a warm welcome to Tubehell , the new therapeutic on-line service that allows passengers to share their experiences of trauma on the London Underground. You couldn’t invent a plot twist such as the story of Mrs Prescott’s hairdo and the limousine You only get things like that in soaps.

You couldn’t invent Mo Mowlam in real life, now could you? Well, then.But when conversation turns to Mr Prescott these days, and people say that he may have big ideas, but he hasn’t really done anything, has he? I am able to say from personal experience that, oh yes, he has; he has been behind the major thrust to get the No 94 running through the lanes of West Wiltshire, and even over the Somerset border into Bath, so I am all behind Mr Prescott!And what else has he done? they ask.That I can’t answer. You only get characters like “Doctor” Jack Cunningham in soaps – smooth, artful and universally disliked. The only sign of cheery life is from the driver, who has a mobile phone and is sometimes rung up by passengers ahead who want to know whether he is on time, or want to tell him that they won’t be at the bus stop so not to wait for them.Not that there really are bus stops; as often as not, he stops where he knows people live, and where they are likely to be waiting. It is customer care on a scale that is undreamt of by the big corporations.Of course, when we normally talk in a personal way about politicians, such as Blair and Prescott, we are not talking about them as people but as characters in a soap opera After all, everyone in New Labour is a character in a soap. Normally if I am trying to get a train from Bath, I catch the local branch line train in from Freshford, the next- door village, but I thought, Well, if there’s a bus coming past my door, let’s get it.In London I used to jump on buses and Tubes all the time, but here in the country I had let it slide. Now, buses are coming back into my life and I remember now what I had forgotten about buses in the early morning – that is, that nobody ever talks on them It’s like a family breakfast Minimum conversation Grunts Groans Turning of papers. It’s a No 94 and it is owned by Bodman’s of Devizes, and it’s a godsend.I even used it myself the other day, to get to Bath in order to catch an earlyish train to London.

Last year Mr Prescott gave out some money to the counties to improve local bus services, and one of the county areas that found itself with more cash was West Wiltshire. Someone with initiative at West Wilts got together some interesting people to advise him on bus routes (you can tell that I’m not very sure of the details) and lo and behold, a bus has started going through our village where it never went before, and it goes at such a time that our son can get on it to go to his new school, and several other times too, between Trowbridge and Bath. Occasionally they mention the famous incident at Bournemouth, where Mr Prescott took his limousine a couple of hundred feet instead of walking, and he then claimed it was to keep his wife’s hairdo from being blown about. He got a lot of stick for that, although I thought it was probably a joke on his part.As I said, a lot of the discussion of Mr Prescott is personal That is to say, completely uninformed I haven’t met Mr Prescott. And he never impinged on my life at all until last year…In a very tangible way, as it turned out.