All hail John Prescott, purveyor of verbal slurpee

Scientists have discovered the source of human language: a gene that mutated 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern creatures were emerging. If we can take seriously the idea that John Prescott is anatomically modern, it is still possible to think this language gene (FOXP2, as you ask) hasn't fully mutated.

The Deputy Prime Minister's hour is upon us. (Luckily it's almost half past.) For the moment, he is the prime minister. We're in his hands. For the rest of the year, his office is insignificant. For the next 30 minutes he is all that stands between us and a recreational invasion of Iraq. We want to be sure that they keep the nuclear button out of range of his left jab.

Perhaps this is the time to ask what it is that we like about John Prescott. In his catalogue of achievements, what stands out to his credit?

Well, he is the opposite of the technocrats (Stephen Byers is the exemplar of this breed); their dry, legalistic interpretation of a politician's role in public life is very different from Mr Prescott's. The technocrats glide smoothly from one position to another without observably travelling the distance in between. Mr Prescott draws attention to himself, glowering and scowling, jabbing and jabbering like a bazaar stallholder selling uncertain goods. He wears his inside on his outside; he shows us things that bourgeois people take care to conceal. You can easily believe there is a person there underneath the politician. We like that, I think.

When he says he'd put his head on the block for his party you get a frisson, as if a politician had said something not only believable but also rather moving. It was that head-on-block speech, incidentally, that rallied the left of the party behind Tony Blair's modernising movement and drove One Man One Vote through conference. Mr Prescott laid one of the most important foundation stones in the New Labour project.

His work is not entirely done. If Tony Blair decides to wage war on Iraq, John Prescott will be one of the few of the Government's office holders who will get any sort of hearing down there in the below-decks of the party.

Um ... what else? Kyoto, people say. He did railroad the agreement through the Kyoto environmental conference. Michael Meacher had done all the brainwork, but lacked the brawn to get the signatories to sign. Kyoto, for all its later lack of achievement, was in large part down to his effort.

Does his half-mutated language gene matter? Is it just a language problem? Let us first relish the problem before considering its implications more earnestly.

Last year in the Commons, Michael Ancram enquired whether it was an objective of the war in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban. This produced a slurry of verbal slurpee that Prescott watchers have treasured ever since.

"Our objectives are clear," he said. "The objectives remain the same and indeed it has been made clear by the Prime Minister in a speech yesterday that the objectives are clear. And the one about the removal of the Taliban is not something we have as a clear objective" (prolonged laughter) "but it is possibly a consequence that will flow from the Tallybin clearly giving protection to bin Laden and the UN resolution made it absolutely clear that anyone that finds them in that position declares themselves an enemy and that clearly is a matter for these objectives."

So, yes, then. Or, more precisely, yes and no.

He is also capable of more obviously comic one-liners: "The Green Belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it," he told a newspaper in 1999. Now that he has personal authority over the building of 200,000 new houses, 80,000 of which will be in Tory-voting, Home Counties constituencies, we see he was speaking the literal truth.

After the fatuities, the failures. It's just as well transport, the environment and the regions don't matter much or Mr Prescott's stewardship would have had serious consequences.

He said in 1997 and again in 1998: "I will have failed if in five years' time there are not ... far fewer journeys by car. It's a tall order, but I urge you to hold me to it." He squirms when this is brought up now, and the sight of Mr Prescott squirming is not a pretty one. Not only has he failed there but also has failed to increase the use of buses. (Ken Livingstone, whom he anathematises, is the only one to have succeeded significantly there.)

Even as he was urging us to replace car use with public transport in our private lives, Mr Prescott's two Jaguars regularly hit the headlines. He drove 250 yards from his hotel to the conference centre; he used the Tube for one stop and was caught slinking back to his Jag; he was held up on a train so called in his ministerial car; he ordered an RAF helicopter to fly him to Blackpool for the illuminations.

These all added to the gaiety of the nation, and gave those who enjoyed it the occasion to be indignant.

A more sobering thought is that his verbal confusion might be a symptom of mental confusion; because he can't talk straight he might not be able to think straight. A cartoon in Punch showed a little girl who'd been told to think before she spoke. She said: "How do I know what I think 'til I see what I say?"

Mr Prescott's 10-year transport plan is evidence that he indeed waited to see what he said, assumed that's what he thought, and chucked it all into the policy.

For instance, Mr Prescott frequently attacked Railtrack as a flawed product of a flawed privatisation model. Yet he has adopted precisely the same central blunder (the fragmentation of management) for the Public-Private Partnership of the London Underground.

His tenure of Transport was astonishingly destructive. The Transport Committee's report on his 10-year plan was chaired by Gwyneth Dunwoody, an independent product of older, though not Old, Labour. Her report, which may well be her undoing, reveals the plan as an incoherent mishmash of pious hopes, confused objectives, impractical strategies, grandiose hopes, misplaced assumptions and pervasive stupidity.

Clearly, the plan could only have been assembled by one person.

The report points out many things, but especially these: there are no annual targets set for travel conditions – it's impossible to measure progress towards 2010, when the plan is complete. There are no clear targets for emissions reductions. There are no targets for reduced traffic levels. The Government's approach to motoring costs in incomprehensible. Confusion over the start date of the plan is a distraction. There is no consensus for rail growth. The plan is regionally unbalanced. There's been no strategic input from the Highways Agency. Cycling levels have not grown at all, let alone doubled, as planned.

The cost of public transport compared with private transport will inevitably increase under the plan. "The Department has paid only lip service to important indicators such as accessibility, safety and social inclusion," it says. On it goes, and on, the most thorough and comprehensive analysis of Mr Prescott's mental processes there has ever been in print.

"I don't pursue vendettas or punch people on the nose," he said in 1994. Half of that statement we know to be untrue. If Mrs Dunwoody is unseated as chair of the Transport committee, we shall know the other half is untrue too.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com