Maybe those members in the UK will have more details.. but I read this and found it mildly entertaining
link
May 31, 2006
A Working-Class Politician Playing Croquet? That's Not Cricket
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, May 30 — First it was sex. Now it is croquet — specifically, whether John Prescott, Britain's avowedly blue-collar deputy prime minister, should resign over playing that traditionally upper-crust game last week when he was, technically, running the country in the absence of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It is, perhaps, a peculiarly British conundrum: where else, after all, would it seem to be a firing offense to stand, mallet in hand, on a billiard-smooth green, tapping colored balls through hoops?
But for Mr. Prescott, the image — splashed on Page 1 of The Mail on Sunday — suggested an insouciance too far after a fling with a secretary, a demotion in the cabinet and his insistence on maintaining the perquisites of office when his job description had been whittled away.
On a scale of power corrupted, British newspapers ranked it somewhere between Marie Antoinette's cakes and Nero's fiddle.
"There's still a sort of residual loyalty, there's quite a bit of affection, but everybody now recognizes that the 'sell by' date is rapidly approaching," said Stephen Pound, a lawmaker from the embattled Labor Party.
"It's very difficult to say why somebody should get 130 grand a year for playing croquet," he said, referring to Mr. Prescott's salary, the equivalent of $250,000.
Of course, there is a dark undercurrent of class struggle here. (This is Britain, after all.)
Mr. Prescott's supporters murmur that the real reason people deprecate his lifestyle is that they resent the notion of a working-class upstart invading the realms of the high and mighty.
There is a more ominous aspect, too. The whiff of scandal seems to cling to Mr. Prescott, and with it comes the lingering question: How long will his patron, Mr. Blair, survive if his protégé's behavior comes to be seen as one more emblem of disrepute eroding blue-collar support for the beleaguered government?
Mr. Prescott, 67, occupies a special position in British politics, at once power broker to the mighty and vaunted icon of the working classes that he describes as his roots.
That role began to unravel in late April, when Mr. Prescott was forced to acknowledge newspaper reports of a clandestine affair with Tracey Temple, his 43-year-old secretary.
On May 6 Mr. Blair shuffled his cabinet and stripped Mr. Prescott of many responsibilities, but left him with his salary and — most significantly — two remarkable perquisites financed by taxpayers: a luxurious apartment in London, and Dorneywood, a 21-room, $19 million mansion in 214 acres of parkland in Buckinghamshire, west of London.
Last Thursday, as Mr. Blair flew to Washington, Mr. Prescott drove to Dorneywood with aides and was photographed tapping a yellow croquet ball against the wisteria-clad backdrop of the 86-year-old residence.
Mr. Prescott's aides said he had merely been having an "away day." But the photographs unleashed a string of calls from Labor lawmakers for Mr. Prescott to quit.
Mr. Prescott, however, is also deputy leader of the Labor Party. If he were dismissed, some Labor insiders argue, he would also have to resign from the party hierarchy, setting off a scramble to succeed him that would intensify the dueling between Mr. Blair and Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer.
A spokesman for Mr. Blair said Tuesday that the prime minister, who is vacationing in Italy, still had full confidence in Mr. Prescott. But The Daily Mirror suggested that when Mr. Blair returned from his vacation, he would strip Mr. Prescott of still more of his privileges — particularly Dorneywood and its croquet lawn.
'Life imitating fiction....' 
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