John Prescott: 'My history shows I think you should defend yourself'

It comes as a sobering thought, sitting in this handsome, sunlit first-floor office at Admiralty House, that if the direst predictions for Tony Blair's future were fulfilled, John Prescott could be Prime Minister by the end of the week. Of course, the Deputy Prime Minister is not remotely planning for that to happen. Indeed, he uses a rather vivid phrase to describe how closely he is locked to his boss. "We're in the same toboggan," he says, adding with a grin: "Sometimes it feels a bit like the – what is that run called? – the Cresta?"

Mr Prescott has probably never been more indispensable to Mr Blair than now. He can still reach parts of Labour few other cabinet members can. Even as the fire dispute reaches another crisis this week, he is proving tireless in the task of explaining to potential dissidents how we got here. And while he won't discuss the high-profile united front between Mr Blair and his Chancellor on Iraq – beyond warmly welcoming the fact that they are working together – he is credited by some ministers with helping to forge it.

He's careful not to make predictions about the next, and most crucial, parliamentary debate when it comes. But he says he thinks that "some of the character of the argument" has changed significantly (in the Government's favour, he implies) from what it was when 121 Labour MPs rebelled against the Government – for several reasons, the first Iraqi and the second French.

The first was the sheer extent of Saddam's Hussein's non-compliance and the contempt the Iraqi leader demonstrated towards the UN. After 12 years of UN resolutions and a supposedly frank and final and unconditional statement of what he had on 7 December, "we are now finding out about rockets, and drones and chemicals. And we still don't know where the anthrax is. If this isn't a man playing around with the UN, feeding them bit by bit, why didn't the records and information come out in December?"

The second was the "intransigence" of France, about which his annoyance – "I must choose my words carefully" -- is at the more vigorous end of the British cabinet spectrum. France had maintained its promise to veto a UN resolution even in the face of all Government's efforts to frame one that could command consensus and offer one last window of opportunity for a Baghdad climbdown and peace.

"If you're being told you must get the agreement of the UN and then one of the top five Security Council members says, 'Well, whatever you come up with, we're still going to veto it' how do you put the arguments to [the smaller countries] who say, 'Why should I put my head above the parapet in difficult circumstances when the French will veto it?' "

When Mr Blair's six tests for President Saddam, later cut to five, had been produced "the French rejected it before the Iraqis. Now, it might have been useful to find out if the Iraqis were going to reject it. But if you are an Iraqi and the French reject it, you're hardly going to be saying, 'Well, perhaps I should accept it'. Many of our people here are beginning to see a connection between the French here and Saddam." The French, he says, and maybe his own past bust-ups with Paris over environment issues are lurking in the Prescott subconscious here, "are acting like the French. We shouldn't be surprised but we can still be disappointed again." Overall, he sums up, "Saddam is a man to my mind – and the Parliamentary Labour Party will take it into account --who is playing with the UN as he has done in the past 12 years and the divisions amongst our ranks, particularly the intransigence of the French, have almost encouraged him to do so."

Two other points, he implies, could also help to shift the party's centre of gravity back towards Mr Blair. One is the extent, underlined, he says, by an affecting presentation to the PLP by the Labour MP Ann Clwyd that British and American enforcement of the no-fly zone in Kurdish Northern Iraq has been of benefit to the very people who had suffered most from the "chemical attack and horror" of earlier war waged against them by President Saddam. And another was President Bush's statement on Friday apparently promoting the "road-map" for the Middle East process, which he cites as another success for the Blair strategy of persuading the US to adopt "multilateral action". He and Mr Blair had watched, in the same room at the Brighton conference on that fateful day, the second plane fly into the twin towers. "Mr Blair had said, 'This will change the world.' And I replied, 'It won't unless we can get a Middle East agreement, bringing justice to Palestine and the recognition of the two states.' And that's always been Tony's view too. I think [the Bush statement and Mr Blair's part in it] is quite significant for Labour MPs".

So if there is a parliamentary vote tomorrow, and assuming no second UN resolution, "the members will have to make a judgement about how effective the Government has been and how committed to get that agreement, the circumstances in which agreement broke down, the judgement about resolution 1441 and whether Saddam ever had the slightest intention of complying with it."

In some ways, perhaps, the political journey for the Deputy PM over the past few months has been less difficult than for some. He is hardly a peacenik, as that punch – to which he drily alludes before I have the chance to – demonstrated during the 2001 general election campaign. "I think my history shows I think you should defend yourself when it is necessary, so clearly I am not a pacifist."

He was never – unlike Mr Blair – a member of CND "because I never really thought the arguments stood up". And he retrospectively recanted last month from his earlier opposition to the Falklands War, which he says did not realise "my worst fears" about the loss of British lives. "And I think we shouldn't forget this" US technology, especially spy satellites, played a crucial part.

And, Mr Prescott implies without saying so, the party has a tendency to resist dictators – and pacifism– when it comes to the crunch. Having a profounder sense of Labour Party history than almost any other government member, he has been thinking about 1935 when the pacifist George Lansbury resigned as Labour leader because the party conference rejected his advice not to back League of Nations sanctions against Italy over the invasion of Abyssinia, and at which Mr Prescott's hero Ernest Bevin had excoriated Lansbury for "hawking his conscience round from body to body asking what he should do with it".

He adds: "You had the leader of our party, a greatly respected man go to the platform and tell them not to do it. It took Bevin to say ... that this is a practical world. And I think this party is faced often with those decisions."

So will Robin Cook and others resign from the Cabinet – and perhaps elsewhere – in the absence of a second UN resolution? It was Mr Prescott, after all, who at the end of a recent cabinet meeting had "eyeballed" his colleagues and said after the PM had spelt out his efforts to get a UN resolution and the difficulties involved: "Now I assume every one of us supports this position," and no one disagreed. "I think we're working very hard to convince everyone of the case and not to choose the route of resignation from everybody who's an MP through to cabinet ministers."

Like Mr Blair himself, he is seeing "quite a lot" of the doubters and while he has no doubt about the breadth and depth of concern "I don't see wholesale resignations."

On Clare Short he has an essentially double message. On the one hand he says: "I don't think there's any doubt she was in breach of collective [cabinet] responsibility." He had spoken to her twice on the evening of her famous interview – one imagines robustly – and it would have been "useful" if she had checked on the intensive efforts Mr Blair was making on the telephone to secure a UN resolution at the very moment she was talking.

Having already insisted Mr Blair's willingness to allow open debate in Parliament demonstrated his willingness to hear alternative views, he cites the non-sacking of Ms Short as an "example of the tolerance of Blair. It's not that he isn't angry about it. No doubt he is. But he'll still keep his eye on the big picture which is Iraq."

Wasn't it rather a sign of relative weakness that he couldn't afford to make a martyr of Ms Short? Not so, he says; he could have told her to go but that would have shifted "the focus on to Clare and resignations" and diverted from what mattered.

On the other hand: "I have a good deal of respect for Clare and I don't mean that in the way politicians always speak. I can see your eyebrows go up. I have had differences with lots of people in the past but that doesn't mean I don't respect them." Ms Short was a "round peg in a round hole" in her job and he found in his travels pursuing the Kyoto agenda how high international regard was for her.

So would Prime Minister Prescott do anything differently? He refers back to the toboggan metaphor and says that "has given you your answer. I have a privileged position as deputy leader of the party. People must make judgements as to what I say and what I don't say. What is not in doubt is that I give support. That's my job. I do it willingly with this man whose judgement I have heard questioned over Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. He has had to take the heat and I'm pretty proud to have been alongside that."