John Prescott had the fight but also the patience, as I discovered on the Battle Bus 'kidnap'

So it was encouraging to find John Prescott disarmed and in talkative mood as we chatted in a lounge at the back of Labour’s Battle Bus.

Unlike his last election campaign, when he punched a protestor who threw an egg at him, the then deputy prime minister was in peaceful form when it came to anything I had to lob at him of the journalistic variety.

Then the coach rolled out of town. And onto the M40. My notebook of questions started to draw thin. The townscape was replaced by puffy white clouds behind the member for Hull East’s head. Could I keep the interview going until Birmingham, Manchester even?

Eventually I got a lift back to town with James Plaskitt, Labour’s local candidate for the 2005 campaign, after we were dropped off at a service station where Tony Blair appeared on overhead screens. In the office of the Leamington Courier, where I cut my teeth as a reporter, the day became known as the Battle Bus kidnap.

In an age when front-benchers either duck or don’t get approached for spots like the BBC’s Newsnight and Today programmes, Prescott, from my encounter, was a politician who was unafraid to hit the ground running without a pre-prepared script.

Affable, witty and able to engage on any topic, his responses were a world apart from the ‘standard lines’ spiel that many of today’s big-hitters revert to in media appearances.

Prescott brought experience as a ship’s steward and trade unionist to his role, which also included heading the then Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions at the time I met him on his nationwide bus tour. He earnt the ‘Two Jags’ nickname after it emerged that he had two official Jaguar cars and would later become a Lord. However he was down-to-earth in the flesh, laughing off the contretemps on the previous campaign, when he landed a jab on the egg-thrower while walking to an engagement in the Welsh town of Rhyl.

Many of the tributes for Prescott come from people who met him at ground level. Tim Iredale, the BBC’s political editor for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, described him as a ‘man of the people’. Paul Sewell, a friend and club chairman of rugby league side Hull Kingston Rovers, said: ‘This guy was John while he was in Hull, but when he was in Westminster he was a world figure, and we just have to reconcile that.’

Climate change was a cause close to his heart and breathing new life into the stuttering COP summits would be a suitable legacy for politicians on all sides of the house.

The politician who took his vision on the road deserves no less.