Escaped rebuke over his appetite for freebies
ONLY once in my life have I had the pleasure of talking personally to John Bercow, who yesterday announced his impending resignation as Speaker of the house of Commons. In those days, the late 1990s, he was a far-out, rightwing backbench Tory MP, though no less unctuous than he is now.
Somehow this extreme Conservative transformed himself into a Speaker who was increasingly sympathetic to Labour, and then happy to twist parliamentary convention in order to frustrate Brexit.
Many have discerned the influence of his wayward, Left-wing wife Sally, an exotic creature who attracted attention in many ways, not least by having an affair with her husband’s cousin, and also endorsing, via Twitter, unsubstantiated and libellous allegations against Lord McAlpine, a former treasurer of the Tory party.
Yesterday she looked on fondly as Mr Bercow made a characteristically self- serving and solipsistic statement, declaring he would stand down as Speaker on October 31 – or immediately, if by some miracle the Government was able to persuade the Commons to agree to an early
Shameless manipulation of convention
election, which it obviously isn’t.
his melodramatic and sententious announcement was immediately followed by a series of sycophantic statements by Labour MPs, who declared that he was a champion of backbenchers’ freedom to challenge the executive – by which they meant the Tory Government.
The truth is that Mr Bercow has been one of the worst Speakers in history. No one would sensibly complain merely because he happened to exchange his right-wing inclinations for Left-wing ones. In principle, his championing of the rights of backbench MPs was a thoroughly good thing.
But far from being an even-handed defender of ordinary MPs, he was often biased, vindictive and hypocritical. No Speaker in modern times has so shamelessly manipulated parliamentary convention to suit his own political preferences.
his preparedness to jettison the traditional impartiality of the Speaker and bend the rules to advance his own opinions was most visible over Brexit. he made no attempt to conceal where his heart lay.
Most notoriously, a bright yellow ‘B******s to Brexit’ sticker was spotted on the windscreen of a black range rover parked in his official spot outside Parliament.
In a talk to students at reading University, he spoke about what he termed the ‘untruths’ of the Brexit campaign, referring to ‘ promises that could no longer be kept’.
Such a blatant lack of neutrality was bad enough in someone holding the ancient office of Speaker. It was made much worse when, during recent parliamentary convulsions, he did his utmost to thwart the outcome of the June 2016 referendum.
For example, in January he plotted with Tory arch-remainer dominic Grieve to force Theresa May to come back to the Commons within three days of a parliamentary defeat. No Speaker had ever attempted such a manoeuvre.
In March, he ruled that the Government could not reintroduce its withdrawal agreement to the Commons, using a probably spurious argument that MPs shouldn’t be asked to vote again on a proposition they had rejected. he trawled parliamentary history as far back as 1604 and produced a precedent as recently as 1920 to bolster his case.
And yet, two months earlier, when he was doing his utmost to give Mr Grieve a helping hand, he had declared: ‘I am not in the business of invoking precedent. Nor am I under any obligation to do so.’
Most recently, of course, he did not even attempt to disguise his feelings when siding with the Government’s opponents to allow them to seize control of the order paper and instruct the Prime Minister to seek an extension to Brexit if no agreement with the eU has been secured by October 19. Amid all the chaos and vitriol of the past few days, many observers have lost sight of just how revolutionary a development this was. Mr Bercow has done what no previous Speaker would have dreamt of doing.
Thanks to him, for the first time in British history – or at any rate since the english Civil War in the mid-17th century – the fortunes of this country are essentially being directed by MPs rather than the government of the day.
Labour and other opposition MPs against Brexit are of course cock-ahoop and wholly unconcerned by Mr Bercow’s constitutional vandalism, even while they cheerfully accuse Boris Johnson of the very same vice.
To their great shame, these people have overlooked other serious charges against Mr Bercow. If he had not been their defender and encourager over Brexit and other issues, they would have undoubtedly
objected to his alleged behaviour.
In 2018, BBC Newsnight accused the Speaker and two other MPs of intimidating Commons staff. In the case of Mr Bercow, it was suggested that he had bullied a senior Commons clerk, Kate Emms, to such a degree that she eventually quit her job with post-traumatic stress disorder. Meanwhile, another former private secretary, Angus Sinclair, told the BBC that Mr Bercow had bullied and intimated him. The Speaker brushed aside these claims, as he had those of Miss Emms.
These allegations came after a devastating report by Dame Laura Cox QC which maintained that the Commons authorities – widely interpreted as meaning Mr Bercow – had tolerated a culture of bullying at Westminster.
In normal circumstances, one would have expected the Labour Party (which is often in the forefront of those rooting out bullies) to put Mr Bercow under serious examination. To its great discredit, it did not. Wasn’t this because it didn’t wish to undermine a dependable ally?
The Speaker also escaped rebuke, from Labour and, alas, most Tory MPs alike, over his keen appetite for freebies, which have been estimated to amount to more than £70,000 since he became Speaker of the Commons in 2009.
While earning £153,145 a year and enjoying a lavish grace-andfavour home on whose refurbishment at least £20,000 has been spent, Mr Bercow received considerable gifts, mostly in respect of sports tickets for football and tennis matches. In one year alone, these amounted to nearly £19,000. These instances of self-indulgence may seem relatively trivial by the side of allegations of bullying and evidence of egregious bias over Brexit. All in all, they do not amount to a pretty picture. So I found the encomiums of Labour grandees yesterday very hard to take. According to the uber-Remainer Hilary Benn (whose outrageous seizing of the order paper Mr Bercow last week facilitated) the outgoing Speaker will be celebrated as the ‘backbenchers’ friend and supporter’ when ‘the history books come to be written’.
Only in a very topsy-turvy world in which balance, fairness and manifest decency are set at nought, and respect for constitutional traditions has been thrown out of the window.
Now, long after passing the retirement date set by himself, Speaker Bercow has finally decided to throw in the towel, no doubt believing his nefarious work has been done. When the Tory party (of which he is, unbelievably, a representative) said it would put up a candidate against him in his constituency at the forthcoming election, he knew the game was up.
Good riddance, many of us will cry. We can only pray that Mr Bercow’s successor, Labour or Tory, will recognise that the Speaker of the Commons should be firm not rude, neutral not partisan, and consensual rather than divisive.