"I was going out with a girl when we did the 11-plus," he said. "She got through and I didn't. Our lives split and it gave me a great sense of failure. I can remember sending her a letter expressing my desire - love if you like, a young kid's feelings - and she sent it back with the spelling mistakes corrected. That summed up the division."

"When I hear people who've been well educated talk in the House of Commons, it's an arrogance," he said later. "They've been blessed, if you like. Those of us who've come through a bad education system are resentful about that."

arrogance adjective
having or showing an exaggerated opinion of one's own importance, merit, ability, etc.; conceited; overbearingly proud an arrogant teacher; an arrogant assumption;
History: C14: from Latin arrogare to claim as one's own;
arrogance noun
arrogantly adverb

Conceit? Overbearing pride? Exaggerated sense of one's own importance? How does being better able to express oneself—a public service, surely?—inspire such accusations?

This is the problem. Whatever I may think of John, and however much he might be genuinely angry at people who can speak lucidly, (a bit pathetic, but we can't stop to shy stones at those dogs), I don't believe he actually thinks that being understandable is some sort of gift from god. Yet that is what he said. He's inarticulate. But even he must understand that, in absence of any seriously debilitating learning disorders, one can learn to become better at just about everything not directly related to physical attributes. Technically, given the responsibility of it, his resentment at his more eloquent colleagues is simply anger at himself. And do we want major political decisions taken on a basis of an outward projection of personal failings and an unwillingness to better oneself?

Mr Prescott certainly doesn't lack ambition. If he turned the drive that got him appointed to Labour's Hull East seat in the House of Commons towards other activities, I imagine he'd do alright. That he's not going to is, sadly, manifest.

What is important to know is 'why?'. It's important because it ties into the electoral reform—and specifically the STV—debate. For reasons of ease, groupthink, existence-justification, natural destructive urges and various other psychological disorders, people have a penchant for ignoring their own failings when there's a more comforting—albeit almost always more specious—reason for the world piling yet more misery and hassle onto their shoulders. Much easier to "hold someone up to obloquy", after all.

Which all means that appealing to senses of intellectual integrity and the like, if they even exist, is not going to get us very far. Trouble is, it's hard to sell something that challenges an MP to prove themselves (by pitting them against another candidate from the same party, thus shifting power from the appointees to the voters, for example) in the baser, more rapacious way seemingly required to truly capture the elusive elixir of 'political force'.

If someone had worked out a way around that one, we wouldn't need to be here. The best I can do is promote the amusement value of it: people like a laugh almost as much as they like to live in denial. On top of that, not only would STV shake things up like never before, but we'd also get more of JP out and about, meeting and greeting as he would finally have to work to hold onto his seat. And articulate or otherwise, one has to appreciate the value of that.

*Dictionary definitions copyright HarperCollins © 2004