In the evening of 16 May 2001, John Prescott, the British deputy prime minister, was hit in the face by an egg while walking to a Labour Party election rally at the Little Theatre in Rhyl, North Wales, in the run-up to the 2001 United Kingdom general election. Prescott hit the protester who had thrown the egg, agricultural worker Craig Evans, with a left-handed jab. A brief scuffle ensued, during which Prescott was pushed into a wall before police and Labour Party supporters moved Evans away. The incident came on the same day that the Labour Party's election manifesto had been launched. Earlier in the day Prime Minister Tony Blair had been confronted by an angry relative of a patient in a Birmingham hospital, and Home Secretary Jack Straw had been jeered at a conference of the Police Feder