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Politicians get punchy as an angry electorate has both parties on the defensive leading up to the country's June 7 election.
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 18, 2001
LONDON -- Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott punches a protester on the chin with a sharp left jab and ends up in a wrestling match with the man he hits.
Prime Minister Tony Blair is ambushed on a street by an angry woman. Conservative leader William Hague and Home Secretary Jack Straw are shaken by similar experiences.
Suddenly, a dull campaign for the June 7 election has taken on an aura of drama and a touch of menace as voter anger and scorn wash over leaders of the two main parties. Violence, and the threat of it, normally are not staples of British politics.
The fisticuffs involving the deputy prime minister Wednesday night were the most captivating part of a lively day.
Prescott, 62, had gotten off his campaign bus to speak at a rally in the north Wales town of Rhyl when he was greeted by egg-throwing protesters angry about high fuel prices.
One egg, thrown at close range, hit Prescott on the side of the head. He swiftly turned and threw a left jab, connecting with the chin of Craig Evans, 29, a farm contract worker. Evans lunged at the portly Prescott and wrestled him back against a wall before police and Labor Party officials separated them.
Prescott, an amateur boxer in his youth, was called "the Bulldog" during his years as a labor organizer. He is known as a man with a short fuse, but on Thursday he described his brawl with Evans as "frightening and regrettable."
"I walked through the crowd, following the police through a very narrow pathway, and suddenly felt a blow to the side of my head," Prescott said. "I responded to defend myself in this melee." He said two female assistants were knocked down in the scuffle.
One farmer who witnessed the incident suggested Prescott should have been arrested, but in fact Evans was. He was released on bail.
The incident prompted two men to don boxing headgear and gloves to greet Prescott at a campaign stop in another Welsh town on Thursday. But neither tried to trade punches with him, and he ignored them.
Wednesday's scuffle illustrated two ways that British campaigning differs from American-style politics.
One, security around the leading campaigners is much lighter than it is in the United States. While the prime minister has a sizable security detail, most other top politicians have little or no protective entourage. When a campaigner's "battle bus" pulls into a town, the local police are on hand, but they don't surround or isolate the candidate as happens in U.S. presidential campaigns.
Another point is that the raw egg is a common form of political protest in British campaigns. "There is a long and honorable tradition of throwing eggs at politicians," said Malcolm Rifkind, leader of the Conservative Party in Scotland.
Former President Clinton encountered that tradition in Warsaw, Poland, on Thursday, when an egg apparently thrown by an anti-globalization protester struck him on the arm during a walk in the city's Old Town district.
"The president laughed at the matter, saying, "It's good for young people to be angry about something,' " spokeswoman Jennifer Palmeri said.
In London, Blair defended Prescott, saying his deputy was a "decent" man. "John has got some very great strengths," Blair said. As reporters burst into laughter, Blair quickly added: "Particularly in his left arm."
Hague, leader of the opposition Conservatives, had a deadpan reply when asked how he would respond if an egg was thrown at him: "It is not my policy to hit voters during an election."
Blair himself was subjected to a four-minute tirade on a Birmingham street by a woman angry over health care on Wednesday. The story dominated evening newscasts, but it was buried on the inside of Thursday newspapers while photos of the battling Prescott were splashed across front pages.
Blair, who has been criticized for holding staged encounters with ordinary Labor supporters during the campaign, looked acutely embarrassed when he was confronted by Sharon Storer, 38, who accused him of not caring about the deplorable state of British hospitals.
Storer was angry because her partner, Keith Sedgwick, 48, suffering from cancer, was forced to wait for a bed at a Birmingham hospital she described as understaffed and filthy, then placed in an unsterile environment instead of the cancer ward. Blair invited her to continue the conversation in private, but she stormed off.
That incident overshadowed what Blair had hoped would be the main campaign news of the day, his launch of the Labor Party platform. Stories about the platform were mostly relegated to inside pages, but so was another story embarrassing to Labor: that Blair aides had tried to get two reporters to ask him "soft" questions at a news conference, in exchange for being recognized first, and they had indignantly refused.
A bad moment for Hague came when he arrived in Wolverhampton and a hostile, jeering crowd surrounded him and his wife when they tried to talk to shoppers. Security men had to step in and extricate them from the crowd. The reason for the crowd's anger was not clear.
Earlier in Portsmouth, Sebastian Coe, Hague's chief of staff and a former Olympic champion runner, wrenched placards from two student protesters who heckled Hague at a campaign stop.
On Thursday in Peterborough, security men hustled Hague off a platform when an angry questioner in his audience moved toward him.
Straw, the home secretary, was repeatedly interrupted by angry shouts and laughter from police officers when he boasted in a speech at Blackpool about Labor's policing record. His claim that Labor had stopped a hemorrhage of officers from already undermanned forces drew slow hand clapping, a sign of derision, and Straw, clearly shaken, had to stop speaking for a few moments.
All of this suggests an unusually angry electorate and could foreshadow an increasingly bitter campaign leading up to the election. But Labor, despite its problems, remains far ahead in the polls. New surveys released on Thursday gave Labor a lead over the Conservatives ranging from 15 percent to 26 percent.