John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott is a British politician who was the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Born in Prestatyn, Wales, he represented Hull East as the Labour member of parliament from 1970 to 2010. In the 1994 leadership election, he stood for both Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, winning election to the latter office. He was appointed Deputy Prime Minister after Labour's victory in the 1997 election, with an expanded brief as Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. A former ship's steward and trade union activist, by the 1990s he was presented as the political link to the working class in a Labour party increasingly led by modernising, middle-class professionals such as Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. In his youth he failed the eleven-plus exam entrance examination for grammar school, but went on to graduate from Ruskin College and the University of Hull. Prescott also developed a reputation as a key conciliator in the often stormy relationship between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. On 27 June 2007 he resigned as Deputy Prime Minister, coinciding with Blair's resignation as Prime Minister. Following an election within the Labour party, he was replaced as Deputy Leader by Harriet Harman. Prescott retired as an MP at the 2010 election. On 8 July 2010, he entered the House of Lords as a life peer with the title Baron Prescott, of Kingston upon Hull in the County of East Yorkshire.Prescott stood as the Labour candidate in the election to be the first Police and Crime Commissioner for Humberside Police, but lost to Conservative Matthew Grove.On 21 February 2015, it was announced that Prescott would return to politics as a special adviser to then-Labour leader, Ed Miliband.
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