Prescott: Feeling terrible

London, April 29: John Prescott’s affair with his secretary, Tracey Temple, may prove extremely damaging to the government, following today’s confirmation that she has decided to sell her story to the Mail on Sunday for a reported ?50,000.

For that kind of money, Temple will be expected to humiliate him by revealing the most intimate details of her two-year relationship with the deputy prime minister.

At a logical level, it should not matter to government whether Prescott had an extra-martial fling, but the affair is being used to attack Tony Blair, who is in trouble on a whole range of other issues, from Iraq to the unsupervised release of dangerous foreign criminals who should have been deported the moment they came out of prison but were not.

Prescott is crucial to government ? and also quite an important figure in official India-UK relations.

Chancellor Gordon Brown yesterday added his name to the list of Labour big guns backing Prescott by stating: “John is a great colleague. He is the person who does so much to bring the Labour movement together.”

Brown’s public praise for the deputy prime minister comes after Blair described Prescott as the government’s “unsung hero”.

However, the publicist Max Clifford was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 today and justified Temple’s decision to tell her side of the story.

Clifford had also represented the Bangladeshi secretary Faria Alam who managed to sell her “kiss and tell” account of her relationship with the England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson for over ?400,000. She said that before they made love in his house in Sweden, he cooked her dinner and then carefully stacked the plates in the dishwasher. The following morning, he grabbed her on the stairs.

Prescott’s indiscretions were first revealed by the Daily Mirror which has published astonishing pictures of the 67-year-old deputy prime minister cavorting with his 43-year-old diary secretary. He did not appear to care that his every move was being photographed by various members of his staff, who are now busy selling their pictures to the papers.

Clifford said today that the initial leak did not come from Temple. “She had absolutely nothing to do with the story coming out, so then she went to the cabinet office and her colleagues for help and advice on how to handle the media and got nothing, nothing at all,” he said.

“All they were interested in was looking after John Prescott. Meanwhile, day after day, she is reading stuff in the papers a lot of which is totally untrue. Don’t you think she’s entitled to stand up for herself?” he went on.

The tabloids are depicting Temple, who has had other affairs, as a “home breaker”. Asked if she wanted to see Prescott lose his job over the affair ? and there are growing demands, naturally, from the Tories that he step down ? Clifford replied: “No. She wants the truth out there. She wants people to judge her as she really is, as opposed to what they are reading which is 10 per cent reality and 90 per cent rubbish.”

Part of the truth must be that now that she has been dumped, she sees no reason why should not make money out of a now ended relationship. In modern Britain, a woman scorned can laugh all the way to a bank if her lover is famous enough.

In fact, some girls deliberately target “celebrities” ? pop singers, footballers, TV folk and the like ? so that they have a worthwhile story to sell.

Several papers are today speculating that Prescott’s career is on the brink. His position certainly would be weakened if she revealed, for example ? this happened when the home secretary David Blunkett had an affair with the American Kimberly Fortier ? that the deputy prime minister had abused ministerial privilege to facilitate his assignations.

A long-standing ally of Prescott told a paper today: “He knows that these pictures of him, a 67-year-old, with this woman all over him have made him look ludicrous. He feels terrible about what it has done to Pauline (Prescott’s wife). He fears that he looks like a silly old fool.”

Some of Prescott’s friends fear that Temple was in league with her boyfriend, lorry driver Barrie Williams, who sold his story to the Daily Mirror for ?20,000.

Labour’s latest election leaflet features Pauline Prescott with a supportive hand on her husband’s shoulder under the heading: “Home pride.” Incidentally, Clifford’s cut from Temple’s ?250,000 will be his standard 20 per cent.