Many in the
country, and probably all in the New Labour Party will remember the sorry affair
of the hijacking of John Prescott’s Dustbin in 1998 by a group of Night
Shift factory workers who had decided to investigate the alleged sleazy goings
on at the Labour run Hull City Council. The episode led to a weird and quite
humorous international media frenzy around The Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
There was of course a serious side to the affair, which became nicknamed Dustbingate
after Michael Brunson rushed to coin it on a headline ITN news story with a
big smile on his face.
By stealth,
guile and point blank theft, these factory workers had beaten some of the UK’s
top journalists to a story that delivered one of the most telling political
blows ever landed on John Prescott, and that would seriously flaw his ‘man
of working people image’ and limit his use as such to Tony Blair. Journalists
like Peter Trollop of World in Action described the event as almost knocking
Prescott out.
What the affair also did was to catapult, not only some of the shenagins going on in the labour run council, but also push another player, who until then had resided in the shadows into the full glare of the media flashlights. That player was the son of the Deputy Prime Minister, Jonathan Prescott. Apart from the factory workers discovering that Jonathan Prescott was a director of a property company called Wyke Property Services Limited, it also discovered to their amazement, that this company had been buying up repossessed houses in many parts of Hull, and in the constituency of John Prescott himself.
Now all of these factory workers were hardened Labour voters and had been all of their lives, one of them was also a Labour Party member, and would be later thrown out the party. This business activity by a PRESCOTT SON on his own father’s doorstep enraged them and spurred them on to greater discoveries, and one particular discovery that would set the media frenzy ball rolling.
By hook and crook the factory workers obtained documents that showed, that former council houses, transferred to a government quango for regeneration purposes through a scheme called HAT, and under the Deputy Chairmanship of Hull Councillor John Black, had taken a decision to sell by tender up to twenty five of their houses, which had already had £18,000 worth of government money spent on them per house, to a company called Wyke Developments, which was run by a man called Simon Cutting, a director of Wyke Property Services, where Jonathan Prescott was also a director.
Given that councillor John Black was a very close friend of John Prescott the deputy Prime Minister, the factory workers felt that coincidence was piling on coincidence. They then discovered the price that Wyke Developments were buying the houses for, a miserable £5000 each.
What also stuck in the throats of the Hull factory workers, was how Jonathan Prescott and Simon Cutting had made such a jump into property development after their less than successful history of running The Petroleum Clothing company which was folded with a less than satisfactory financial arrangement with its many furious creditors, which included Her Majesty’s revenue services owed more than £350,000.00.
One wonders how government housing agencies like the HAT, with past budgets of ten of millions of pounds would even consider any financial involvement with businessmen with such a very recent chequered past.
The factory workers decided to light the blue touch paper and sold some of their documents to the press. A media explosion then followed with revelations that Wyke Development had bought the houses for five thousand pounds each, and that houses would be transferred to Wyke Property Services Limited, where Jonathan Prescott was a director. After a roasting in The Observer and The Sunday Times, John Prescott claimed that the factory workers had mounted a vendetta against him in Hull. In response it was ‘cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’ and the hounds of press pack were despatched to see off upon the peasant Hull factory workers uprising for daring to threaten the local throne of King John.
If it was a ploy to shut them up it went badly wrong and more revelations about the Son of Prescott poured forth from the newspapers, and what John Prescott and Alistair Campbell had started was now going badly wrong. It was also taking its toll on the John Prescott public image. By day 12 of the affair it was almost as if someone had thrown a switch and turned off the media lights on John Prescott and Hull. Several journalists expressed their anger at being pulled off juicy follow-up stories. It left many question unanswered, and those questions still linger today.
John Prescott himself seemed to go to ground, in an attempt to rehabilitate his battered public image with time and distance from the event. He raised his head above the parapet only to declare that an investigation by auditors from his own department had cleared him of any knowledge of the transaction on the former sale of the houses, since it had been the department he was Secretary of State for that had been ultimately responsible for these houses.
He emerged some months later to re-launch himself on Sunday morning GMTV using Gordon Brown and wife as his political cheer leaders on the side-lines. But the re-launch never quite got off the ground and the Dustbingate affair would stalk him for many years to come, with stories popping in and out of the press, not least because the factory workers wrote a best selling book and themselves launched a comedy movie script to go with it.
The affair became part of the local folk law in Hull and if you mention it, people still chuckle that five ordinary Joes from Hull dared to challenge the powerful John Prescott, and come out of it with money in their previously empty pockets.
Today history has moved on and recent enquiries reveal the houses bought by Wyke in 1998 appear to have been sold on. Several tenants who reside in these properties confirmed this to an investigator who knocked on their doors. Of course what many are now really interested in is, how much did this sale net for those involved?
Letters requesting this information to the former directors of Wyke, Simon Cutting, Jonathan Parnes, son of the Guinness Fraudster, and Jonathan Prescott were quickly dispatched to put this question to them. A similar letter was sent to the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, but more as a gesture of courtesy, since no one at his departments ever tells him what is going on, well not in 1998 anyway.
We also made requests of the appropriate office to supply us with the auditors’ report that allegedly cleared Prescott. After some eight weeks the report duly arrived, and to say the least, it is hardly ‘Road to Damascus stuff’, but very bland, very official with all I’s dotted and t’s crossed. But does it clear John Prescott? That is no more than a matter of opinion, and dependent on how many friends one has in the media, and how loud they can shout for you.
On the down side for Prescott there are those who are of the opinion that the report does not clear Prescott like Councillor Terry Geraghty who read the Auditors report at the time, and states “That if anything, the report was neutral. It certainly did not clear him.” There are many others who share that view, and are, just like John Prescott entitled to express it, and did in 1998, only they did not have the friends in the media to shout as loud as John Prescott’s did.
Yet the question in hand is such a simple one, and still they twist and turn to avoid an answer. How much did Wyke and its share holders make from the sale of the former council houses, amongst other questions? No written reply was received from any of those sent letters. On the question of the letter to The Deputy Prime Minister, we can safely assume he was not informed of the enquiry, or that when told, he held his fingers in his ears, closed his eyes and loudly hummed, since this may well have worked in the past. It seems to have therefore been left to an indignant Simon Cutting to respond to the letters of enquiry with two ranting phone calls that made it almost impossible to get a word in. Mr Cutting though did mention the word “I will sue you,” in both telephone calls. He also claimed all the stories in 1998 had been made up, and went on to call the factory workers who sold their information to the press, “Buffoons… who had cost him millions.”
So with all the enquiries we have made, we are no closer to finding how much money was made from the sale of state assets belonging to the British tax payer, and sold to a company that had a business association with the son of the Politician responsible for the government department which sold them, John Prescott and sold by a trust which his best friend, Councillor John Black was Deputy Chairman of. No one it seemed knew what was going on then, and no one wants to tell the British taxpayer what has gone on since.
Maybe any committed investigative journalists reading this article might be interested in finding out. Though with the nature of the newspapers these days we shall not hold our breath. So I suppose we will have to leave that up to those intrepid Hull factory workers who seemed to be able to expose what professional journalists could not. Does anyone have their addresses?
Wyke Property
Services Limited
Company number 03425788
Directors were listed as Mr John P Prescott,
365 Salthouse Road, Sutton, Hull HU8 9HB
Date of birth listed as September 63 [exact date has worn off the Original]
Occupation – property developer
Mr Simon Cutting,
61 Swanland Hill
North Ferriby
North Humberside HU14 3JL
Occupation – Manager
Mr Jonathan Parnes
18 Lawrence Street
Chelsea,
London SW3 5NF
Occupation: broker
21/12/1960
Company Secretary
John Prescott
365 Salthouse Road, Sutton, Hull HU8 9HS
The company secretary does not have to list his date of birth or occupation. As such we do not know if this was the Deputy PrimeMinister or not. He also does not have to sign the form.
Another shareholder was Stephen Hardcastle Agnew, Old Rectory, West Acre, Kings Lynn, Norfolk
Background
– Jonathan Parnes was the brother of Guinness Fraudster Anthony Parnes,
Simon Cutting was the son of James Cutting, local shipping magnate and one time
chairman of the Anglo Soviet Shipping Company who was apparently John Prescott’s
political opponent during the 1966 Seaman’s Strike.