The Times March 06, 2010- Ginny Dougary
Pauline Prescott talks to Ginny Dougary about public humiliation, private anguish - and why her husband now does the housework
Pauline Prescott and I have been instructed to keep the volume down by a prefectorial therapist down the corridor from our tiny "treatment" room, where we are sitting opposite one another across a table, mercifully, rather than a collapsible massage bed.
For one of us, at least, the pre-emptive admonition is redundant. Paul, as she is known by her husband (she calls him Prescott, as in, so she says, "Move it, Prescott") has the dulcet tones that our greatest playwright celebrated, "Her voice was ever soft/ Gentle and low, an excellent thing in a woman." The former Deputy Prime Minister, however, unlike Shakespeare, apparently ticks off his wife for speaking too quietly. Well, tick-off shtick-off... Since Traceygate, the balance of power in their 50-year marriage has, Mrs Prescott confirms, shifted (irrevocably, one suspects) to her advantage.
She has just emerged from a photo shoot in one of the elegantly dilapidated rooms of the House of St Barnabas in Soho, formerly a home for the homeless, still a charity, and now doubling as a pop-up private members' club for the metropolitan chic crowd. Her appearance is, as ever, immaculate. Unaccustomed as she still is to her turn in the limelight, however, Mrs P had a slightly wobbly moment in the ladies' loo worrying that she didn't look groomed enough (as if) for the photos.
Pauline's appearance is - to use her favourite word - absolutely "fab": the familiar jeujed-up raven mane, spidery eyelashes (a mixture of falsies and natural, truly fabulash), a tailored black trouser suit and fitted cream shirt (Jaeger), and a trio of black patent-leather accessories - a wide belt with a Courrèges-ish silver clasp, faintly dominatrix spike-heeled ankle boots, and a big slouchy shoulder bag. Talk about the "wow!" factor.
Her style has often been commented on - not always kindly - but this has more to do with its almost anachronistically high-maintenance glamour, particularly in the UK, where the prevailing look is more understated. In Italy or even New York - with her Nancy Dell'Olio nails'n'lashes femininity - Mrs P would blend in just peachily.
She looks great at 71 but, boy, she was something else in her youth. The cover of her new and first book, Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking - a none too oblique reference to her husband's two-year affair with his secretary, Tracey Temple - has a photograph of her as a wide-eyed ingénue, recalling a young Jean Simmons or Elizabeth Taylor (whom Pauline was often said to look like, although when John was wooing her, she tells us gamely, he said she reminded him of - what a charmer - Joyce Grenfell).
In another life, although she has no regrets at all about having been a full-time mother and housewife, Mrs P would have liked to have gone into fashion: "When I get up in the morning, it's fashion TV straight on. I love all that. Yes, well, I could have done that. That's probably what I would have done." As a designer? "Not particularly, well, sewing clothes - I just love to wear them. I love Valentino and if I was to choose somebody to dress me, it would be Armani - I just adore his clothes. But I'm also wearing clothes, since I can still get into them, that I've had for about 30 years. Vintage, you know, and when I put them on, people say, 'Wow! Like that suit!'"
She was dead chuffed that Sarah Brown had invited her to the next evening's Fashion Relief charity show to raise funds for Haiti, and the following day's newspapers showed shots of Pauline alongside the PM's wife and Naomi Campbell.
John Prescott was also handsome as a young man, the couple cutting a considerable dash as they jived around the dance halls of Chester: "He was so much like Robert Wagner. Oh very much, and Dirk Bogarde - a cross between the two," Pauline says. I ask her, rather baldly, whether she feels he has lost his looks. "Well... ah... we all get older. But, I mean, to me, he's my John and..." But you can still see him objectively - the weight gain and so on? "Yes, he has put on weight but he has diabetes, you know. I think he carries it well. He's very fit, actually. [They jived together at their local Chinese restaurant the previous week.] He goes to the gym and that sort of thing. But looks are only skin-deep. That's what they say, don't they?"
She likes people to be smart - not surprisingly, since she makes such an effort herself - but they don't have to be beautiful or slim. In fact, she says - and this is unexpected - John met Gok "How to Look Good Naked" Wan, the other day: "And he said, 'He's the most charming young man' - they got on extremely well." After the Prescotts' television forays into programmes on class and the North-South divide, is it possible that John and Gok are going to do a TV show together? What an amazing idea... "No, I don't think so," Pauline laughs gaily but not entirely unequivocally.
Actually, her husband is full of surprises. Who would have thought, for instance, that John Prescott would have any interest in reading the seminal feminist novel The Women's Room, by the American author, Marilyn French, which honed in on the frustrations and depressions of a generation of stay-at-home suburban moms. "It was a staggering revelation to me that someone could feel like they were in a trap and couldn't get out of it," he said. "It must be terrible, absolutely terrible."
More intriguing is the question of who pressed the book on him since it wasn't his wife, who hasn't read it herself: "No, I didn't make him read it, actually I don't read books very much, quite frankly," she says. "I'm a great television person, really." Her husband apparently is a great reader, mainly biographies: "He's absolutely Oliver Cromwell mad... He was his hero, and Churchill, as well."
Pauline had her first brush with women's lib in the late Sixties, when she worked as a hairdresser to support John, who was studying economics and economic history at University of Hull: "There was this whole women's group sort of thing, and I was asked to join them to [protest] against this pub that men used to go to where women weren't allowed in, but I said, 'Why shouldn't the men go there for a drink? I don't give a toss!' I mean, I go for a drink with my female friends and it's nice to be on your own without men, isn't it? You don't need to be escorted. Afterwards John said, 'You didn't go down at all well with the sisters, Pauline.'"
After the news of his affair broke, four decades on, it was another group of "sisters" (Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell, et al) who phoned Pauline to offer their support: "They've been great with me, absolutely lovely, and I got on well with all of them."
Up to now, Pauline Prescott has been the most discreet and private of politicians' wives. "I've always kept my distance and people have thought, I'm like a bit of a mouse, maybe," she says. "You can cause a great deal of embarrassment to your husband when he's in the position he was in, and if I had given my views... Well, I don't always agree with John, you see, so..."
It was her boys, as she still calls them, who encouraged her to do the book - "Go on, Mum, go for it!" - after she had been approached by various publishers. She has two sons by Prescott, Jonathan, 47, a businessman who now acts as her agent (negotiating a fee of £350,000, not far behind his father's £500,000 book deal in 2008), David, 40, a former journalist who is hoping to become an MP, when his father stands down after 40 years representing Hull East, and Paul Watton, 54, the son of a married US serviceman, whom she had given up for adoption. Their happy (newspaper-orchestrated) reunion, some years back, was the subject of a prolonged media blitz.
Pauline is full of praise for her book's ghostwriter, Wendy Holden, and - with characteristic modesty - feels that it was she, not Holden, who was fortunate to be paired with such a collaborator. "You know she did Goldie Hawn's book," she says. "And after me, she went over to do Barbara Sinatra!"
How did she find the experience? "Well, I said, 'I'll probably clam up and end up stuttering,' but it was like an unlocking - it just all flowed out. It's been very therapeutic - we laughed, we cried - places that have been locked up for years because, of course, my boys didn't know about my baby Paul... Lots of things like that.
"For years, people had never really asked me a great deal about my point of view, apart from my friends, and I've always kept quiet because of John. And I'm speaking because you're asking about me basically, aren't you? And so, yeah, I can let out my points of view now, without causing any embarrassment to John."
One of the problems with this sort of book deal - the perils of Pauline, indeed - is the commercial quid pro quo, meaning Mrs P has had to invade her own privacy to a degree and dwell on matters that she would rather not have in the public domain. Although she writes about the affair in her book, she is not really comfortable talking about it, certainly not the specifics: "I don't want to get in to too much depth about that. I have described how I felt about the affair and I accept the fact that he had it but the personal stuff - it happened and that's it. End of story. I don't bear any grudges and I don't want to get into anything else about that."
It would obviously have been easier to handle if the Prescotts had not been so much in the public eye, but she says: "When it happens to a woman, it's devastating no matter who they are. But when you have to do it in the eyes of the media... I mean, the next day it was just bedlam outside my house - it's in a cul-de-sac and all the camera people were there."
How could we forget it? John had fled to Dorneywood but Pauline insisted she had done nothing wrong and was damn well going to stay put in her own home and - what's more - go right ahead and have her new, swanky downstairs loo installed. I tell her that we all loved her for that; it might just have been her finest hour. Certainly, there could be no question that Mrs P would be leant on to do one of those grisly "Disgraced MP embraced by sorrowful but forgiving family" photo opportunities. "That was like my mum," she says. "My mum was so feisty. It's sort of like a northern thing... Just get on with it.
"But your self-esteem does take a hell of a battering... My boys and my daughters-in-law and my friends were a huge help and the letters I received! I tried to answer them all... But if you could just pop this in" - I'm happy to oblige - "'Thank you to all the people who wrote to me.' You know, you can't run away from things because it's always there to meet you."
There was more northern grit in her insistence on reading every newspaper exposé: "John said, 'You're putting yourself through an awful lot more pain.' I used to sit at home watching what was going to be in the papers on Sky. I saw the whole lot. You can't confront anything until you've seen exactly what you are going up against, frankly."
She holds no truck with the idea that the loneliness of the Westminster lifestyle - the late nights, work stress, separation from your family and so on - might be tough on a red-blooded man. In fact, she gives me an hilariously old-fashioned look when I go down this path. "No, if a man wants to do it, he'll find a way of doing it. You can travel and it can happen at any time, can't it?
"And let's face it, I've been married all these years and I have never had an affair." Have you ever been tempted? "No." Have you never even been attracted to another man? "Oh, yes! I've looked at somebody and thought, 'You're handsome.' You still do, don't you? But I think about what I would be losing and I don't think it's worth it, quite frankly. And to lose the respect of your family, as well."
Has John regained that respect? "Yes, he has because he was deeply, deeply ashamed and sorry. Some people thought, 'A bit of a doormat, hanging on there,' and that sort of thing. But you don't throw your life away. You like your lifestyle and all that, and you've got your family to consider. I couldn't have accepted it if there had been love involved - and John said there was no love, and so I have accepted that."
You said that if it had been "a quickie in a cupboard" you could have handled that. "No, funnily enough, I didn't really say that. I didn't check that in the book and it was Wendy who put that in. It wouldn't have been my terminology to describe it that way. But if it had been once at, like, an office party - I could have accepted that. What was hurtful was the deceit of the whole two years."
The affair seemed to have happened around the same time as the newspaper revelations about Pauline's son, Paul, about whom John had always known. "Yes, it was, funnily enough, and some people have said to me, 'Oh, did that trigger it?' But no, because our marriage was good. It has always been good. That's why it was like a bolt out of the blue.
"What he did was very wrong and dreadfully humiliating, you know, and I don't and won't forgive him because, in my mind, to forgive is to condone. I'm sad when I think about it - I just think about what we had - but I'm not bitter. If I felt bitter about it, then I couldn't have stayed with him - so you just move on from that."
Do you talk about it any more? "You can't not talk about it and we have been very open. People ask me for advice and I say, 'Well, you know, frankly, you have to...'" She stops. "Sorry, give me a minute. It still gets to you." Oh, I'm sorry. "No, no, it's all right. No, it's OK. We speak openly about these things... but you don't dwell on it. If you keep going on about it, then you can't move on, can you? But you don't just say, 'Right, I forgive you,' and then forget it."
Do you understand why and how it happened? "Not really, because I couldn't have done a thing like that." Do you believe that men are different, then? "Yes, because they can block it off and it's sort of on one side, in a little box over there. They musn't have a conscience. But women can't do that, can they? I don't know. I couldn't.
"And I'm not judgmental about people - I'm really, really not - but I couldn't live with myself. I'd have to tell and clear my conscience immediately. I'd want to be, sort of, 'Forgive me, please.'"
When you insisted that he didn't resign over the affair, how much of that was about you not wanting to give up the lifestyle? "I'll be honest, I enjoyed it, obviously. John's brilliant and I was very proud of him being Deputy Prime Minister. We were together as a family unit and we'd all worked very hard for what he'd done, and I didn't want to see it thrown away, just because of that [the affair]. He'd earned it. And it was coming on to an election, so you can't do that. He would definitely have resigned but I said, 'No!' And so we sat down with the boys and had a proper discussion about it."
Incidentally, Pauline would like to point out that her husband, like the "very charismatic, warm, lovely" PM, "is so well thought of on the world stage. It's just our own people that mock them. That is what annoys me. With John, they make him out to be stupid because of the way he can't put his words together. No problem connecting with people, though!"
I wonder how her husband has changed towards her. She says that he has always been thoughtful - although he's not particularly touchy-feely, more of an "actions speak louder than words" man: buying flowers and bringing her cups of tea in bed. She says in her book that, post-Tracey, she has become stronger and he has become softer. To me, she says: "I think he appreciates me more, and doesn't take me for granted. He's very, very thoughtful. He likes to surprise you and take you somewhere nice. He's a very, very kind man and fond and, quite frankly, if he sees you're tired, it's not a case of, 'Oh, that's your work, woman.'
"Actually, the other week, I said to John that I was so far behind in my housework - it's a big house, and I've never had any help for it - and I said, 'I've got to wax this whole floor, can you put the wax on?' So he does jobs like that. And then I said, 'And while you're down there, wash the skirting boards.'"
Well! That truly is a shift in the power dynamic, isn't it? (I'm thinking Joseph Losey's The Servant, here.) She laughs: "But it's true. I'm not just saying that."
What intrigues me about her husband are his neuroses behind all that strop and swagger. Just the other week, he gave a classic Prescottian performance on Newsnight - eyes blazing, jowls quivering - defending Gordon Brown against the PM's would-be nemesis, Andrew Rawnsley. But to read about his crippling social awkwardness - an inability to enter a public room, for instance, without his wife going in first ("He gets very self-conscious, even now," she says) - let alone the bulimia in such a big, macho fisticuffs fella, is as fascinating as Tony Soprano's reliance on his shrink.
It was Pauline's mother, interestingly, who first spotted her son-in-law's odd behaviour around food. "Yes, my mum picked that up and said, 'Keep any eye on him, Pauline, I think something's wrong there.'" Had her mother come across bulimia before? "No, she just noticed little signs and she was very wise."
It seems strange to me that Pauline hadn't observed something herself, on his breath for instance. Anyway, she says, "He's completely through that now." His favourite dish of hers is lamb hotpot, "but in my fridge, I always say, 'Look, you make your own choice here,' because you can't treat people like children, can you? There's the naughty bits - and, I mean, I love my naughty bits, too - but there's always loads of fruit at the bottom."
(I ask her about her famous sandwiches - much commented on for their perfect crustless triangles. "Isn't that funny? Do other people do big doorsteps or something? Shall I tell you who taught me? John did, because he used to be a waiter at sea and everything was done in style and, you know, even my boys do the most wonderful sandwiches. It's good presentation.")
Is she able to explain why her husband has these hang-ups? "I don't really know, only John can answer that. He is quite a complex character, I suppose," she says. "But I'm a great believer that these things stem from childhood. You know, he saw his father, Bert - a big philanderer - kissing a lady, when John was young, and he went to the police station and said, 'Arrest my father,' and I think it all stems from that."
It was his mother, Phyllis, however, who told a journalist about Pauline's baby, Paul, which is how the story got out. "Well, yes, that was upsetting. I wasn't happy about it at all. And after all those years, yes, it was rather sad.'' Had Phyllis lost it mentally? "No." So she knew exactly what she was doing? "Oh, yeah." What on earth was her motivation? "The sensationalism of it? It is strange, actually."
But then, since it seems that her natural inclination is to be both fair and positive, Pauline lists Phyllis's virtues: "She came from strong mining stock and was a brilliant woman and a brilliant mother. She liked to control and when I came on the scene she was not, you know, happy [particularly with an out-of-wedlock baby in tow]... But knowing all that was going on with the father, she did keep the whole family of five children together, and John was the head of that family.
"She was a very kind lady, too. I used to make my clothes, but she was a wonderful seamstress and used to make them for me, too. She worked at a mental hospital in Chester and not only did she teach the patients dress-making but she put on a fashion show for them with a catwalk and everything. She was a good mum, really, and I did tell John, 'You weren't very warm about your mum in the book.'"
Old habits die hard, and although, perhaps for the first time in the past four decades of public life, Pauline feels she can speak her own mind, she is still protective of her John. So when I ask her what she thought of him telling Tony Blair that the way the former PM paraded his deputy's working-class credentials made him feel "like a performing seal", her first response is, "How bloody stupid!" then, "Oh, I can't really give a view on that."
Who was on the phone more to her husband, Tony or Gordon, in Prescott's role as a sort of marriage counsellor? "It was pretty even-stevens - it was, well, I knew quite a lot of what was going on then, but you don't really say - but it was an interesting time, you know... to say the least."
Like she says, looks are only skin-deep and I think her looks had distracted me from her qualities as a person. Pauline has none of the chippiness or awkwardness of her husband - who also emerges as a more three-dimensional human figure after talking to her - but is hugely appreciative of all the good things that have come her way. If he is a glass half empty, she is a glass half full, and that just might be the secret of their long marriage's equilibrium.
She seems pretty convinced that her husband will go into the Lords - "They want him to go into the Lords and it's common knowledge that he would like it." So you will be Lady Prescott, how cool is that? "My God, yes! He's leader of the Council of Europe, so he'll still do that and he's very much into the environment and works with Al Gore [her favourite world figure: "He is a very handsome man"] so that's what he'll do from the Lords when he steps down."
Prescott used to joke that his wife didn't need to be a Lady since she was already one, and I see what he means. She has a natural dignity and grace, with no hint of brashness. She reminded me of the actress Gina McKee, that same soft northern voice and manner, with the occasional glimpse of Alison Steadman (circa Abigail's Party). She's also fun, telling me how delighted she was to be told "by someone from gay liberation that I am a gay icon".
She is having the time of her life, right now, and like "the sisters" and her sons, one wants to urge her, "Go for it, Pauline!"
"Do you know what? I'm getting very feisty in my old age," she says. "It's a different ball game because people know me for me now. I've never craved attention nor have I shunned the limelight. Parliament and so on, I just adored all that. And even now, I'm not thinking, 'Right, where's this going to take me?' If things happen, they happen and, quite frankly, at my age - you know - I don't need anything, do I? But I must say, I'm enjoying this."
Fab.
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Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking by Pauline Prescott, published by HarperCollins, is out now