Bercow is still spouting his pompous bile

WHAT do you get when you put a little man with a giant ego in a studio with a comedian known as The Guilty Feminist who hates the Tory Party?

A heady combination of bile and pomposity, that’s what. I refer to a new podcast called Absolute Power in which John Bercow, the former Commons Speaker, attacks senior Tory politicians with the help of humourless humorist Deborah Francis-White.

First on the Bercow hit list was Michael Gove, the Housing and Communities Secretary, who is also in charge of the Government’s levelling-up agenda.

‘When he was Chief Whip, on one occasion Michael Gove got lost in the loo which is the thing a whip would excoriate someone else for,’ says Bercow, who was himself once nicknamed ‘Golden Bladder’ after overseeing an 11-hour debate on Syria without once nipping to the toilet. ‘I am an admirer of the many talents of Michael Gove but I regarded him as an utterly ineffably hopeless Chief Whip,’ he adds.

Meanwhile, all that mattered to Boris Johnson, according to Bercow, was the ‘acquisition and retention of power ever since he appeared on the face of the Earth’. Much bitterness is reserved for William Hague, who used his powers as Leader of the Commons on his last day as an MP in 2015 to try (and fail) to engineer a coup against the insufferable Bercow.

‘It was, frankly, a pitiful way for him to conclude his parliamentary career,’ says his would-be victim. ‘He was standing down at the general election and subsequently went to the House of Lords.’

How that must stick in Bercow’s craw. He is the first Speaker in more than 200 years to be denied a peerage, not least because of his fevered but futile attempts to sabotage Brexit.