Just playing cowboys

UK’s philandering Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, is facing his political executioners, this time for playing footsie with Colorado is a billionaire conservative and gay basher, Philip Anschutz.

The key issue surrounds Anschutz’s leasing of London’s Millennium Dome and his plans to turn it into a super casino.

Prescott has apparently been feted by the filthy rich religious rightist, including an entire July weekend he spent at his 35,000-acre ranch, Eagle's Nest, an hour from Denver.

The suggestion that Prescott was being lured to support the gambling homophobes financial interests is the centerpiece in the drama.

Emails have come to light purporting to show that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister tried to scupper a rival application by planning officials.

Pressure on Prescott shows no sign of relenting, despite the Deputy Prime Minister's insistence that he would not quit and his denial of any impropriety or involvement with the casino application process.

The real issue is that Prescott is number two in a party whose roots are decidedly left wing working class. The resentment at sleeping with the enemy will run deep, and reflect back on the embattled PM, Tony Blair.

Class war runs deep in the British psyche, and it is also the country which spawned words and concepts like socialism and liberalism, though the latter has quite different connotations to those in the US.

Blair’s Labour party has its roots in workers movements, unionism. The party till has its remnants of hard leftists. In fact his government was recently styles as Leninist.

But Tony likes to play with the big money kids and his deputy, out of the rough and tumble of industrial England has developed the taste as well.

Explaining his weekend in Colarado, Prescott said it was to satisfy an ambition to see a working cattle ranch - stirred by watching Westerns as a boy. How sweet.

UPDATE:

The London Daily Mirror ran their story under the headline: WYATT TWERP

Prescott blames ranch trip on love of cowboys

JITTERY John Prescott yesterday insisted he only made his controversial visit to American billionaire Philip Anschutz's ranch because he likes cowboy movies.

His bizarre justification came as he was quizzed on radio over meetings with the gambling tycoon, who wants to turn the Millennium Dome into a casino.