Go, Johnny, go.

Leaving aside what Tony Blair means when he says that John Prescott is absolutely vital to the Labour Party - that John Prescott is absolutely vital to the continued survival of Tony Blair, in the sense that Mr. Prescott pacifies the socialist throwbacks that still make up the core of the party's grassroots, and does this in retun for Mr. Blair's having given him a high-profile job at which he is, demonstrably, almost criminally incompetent - this article in today's Telegraph contains an interesting snippet:

...after pledging that he had had no other mistresses since Labour came to power.

One grows accustomed to these pedantic, legalistic constructions, and it can be taken almost for granted that when Mr. Prescott affirms having strayed only once "since Labour came to power", the line is drawn where it is for a very good reason. So all that political hay made in the mid-Nineties at the expense of Tories like Steven Norris - "Life's better under the Tories" suggested to be one of his chat-up lines, for instance, or the suggestion that they believed ethics to be a county near Middlesex - was not only cheap, politically irrelevant and opportunist, but is now more-or-less revealed to be entirely hypocritical.

I've never held with the notion that adultery makes a man unfit for public office, and I don't believe that Mr. Prescott should be sacked for it, although the list of things for which he should be sacked has probably needed updating pretty much weekly since Labour came to power, so I'd be quite happy to see him go over this matter if public opinion is strong enough (which unfortunately I don't believe is the case). I don't, in other words, believe many people agree with the father of the friend at whose house I had dinner last night, who opined that of the three Labour crises this week - Clarke, Hewitt and Prescott - this was the worst of the three. I'm not sure whether he meant it would prove the most damaging or whether he meant that he personally found it the most dishonourable, but either way I think he was flat-out wrong. No-one cares about affairs any more - or at least the majority are these days capable of distinguishing the straying husband from the competent (or otherwise, in Mr. Prescott's case) minister - and even if they did, in a week in which the Home Secretary admits to having lost track of 1,000 foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation on their release from prison, and in which the Health Secretary is booed and heckled by a group so generally pliant and placid as nurses, it could hardly matter less. Adultery is indeed dishonourable, and my friend's father, from what I know of him, places a high premium on fidelity, but in political terms surely the dishonour is greater in having known, for example, of the release of, and subsequent failure to monitor, hundreds of prisoners who could have been deported and instead were left free to recidivate, for some ten months, and neither said nor done anything about it until the whole murky matter was dragged into the light.

Clarke should definitely resign for his mess. Prescott, were he remotely able, shouldn't, but if this is the only way to rid ourselves of this knockabout yob, so be it.