By: Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott strongly denied pubished claims Thursday that he had told a group of legislators that the U.S. administration had done a "crap" job of promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Some headlines on the alleged remark flatly read: "Bush is Crap."
Harry Cohen, from the governing Labour Party, said Prescott told the legislators that he had backed the Iraq war in the hope that Washington would press for the Middle East peace plan known as the "road map," but said he was disappointed by the efforts of U.S. President George W. Bush.
"He said he only backed the Iraq war for the road map . . . and he was really lamenting the lack of progress on the road map, and he said quite specifically that the Bush administration was crap in taking the road map forward," Cohen told The Associated Press.
Cohen claimed Prescott went on to say "that Bush was a cowboy in a Stetson hat, too simplistic instead of getting down to the work of the road map."
But Prescott, who is in charge of the government while Prime Minister Tony Blair is away on vacation, said in a statement that Cohen's description of the meeting, first reported in The Independent newspaper, was inaccurate "and it is not my view."
Blair's close alliance with Bush has long caused anger within his governing Labour Party. The upset intensified this month over his refusal for several weeks to call for an immediate end to fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, a stance that he conceded had caused unease even within his cabinet and among Foreign Office experts on the Middle East.
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