The Prescott Memoirs

Former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, is said to be in discussions with a publisher on a book about his life story.

I can't imagine that very many people would be all that interested - certainly not enough to make the rumoured £500,00 fee worthwhile. Prescott was famed for making utterly incomprehensible speeches in the Commons, and there is nothing to indicate that his outpourings would be any more intelligible in written form.

It seems to me that, if such a book deal were to go ahead, the services of a very talented ghost writer and a whole bunch of interpreters would be called for. Or, alternatively, the publishers could save themselves an awful lot of money by sitting a trained chimp at a keyboard, letting it bang away at the keys for an hour or two and printing the result unedited - chances are, nobody would notice the difference.

Billy Seggars.