Unspeakable

by John Bercow W&N 464pp £20 The Week bookshop £15.99

“Brevity”, writes the recently departed Speaker John Bercow in his new memoir, “is not my strong suit.” You can say that again, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday. This autobiography should really have been called

Unstoppable, “as it goes on and on and on, surfing the waves of its own long-windedness”. Bercow never uses one adjective when three are available: Ken Clarke is “authoritative, passionate and humorous”; Bercow’s wife, Sally, is “stimulating, clever and hugely attractive”. When assessing his own life, he dwells on every achievement, however modest: at primary school, he was “Highly Commended” for tap dancing; he once beat Boris Johnson 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 at tennis. He keeps reminding us “what a wonderfully fair Speaker he was”, and quotes his “pompous put-downs” as if they were poetry. “Egotism bursts out from every page.”

Rather surprisingly, given his Remainer sympathies, Bercow “began his political career on the racist fringes of the Tory Right”, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. In his late teens, this son of a Jewish taxi driver joined the Powellite Monday Club, which wanted Commonwealth immigrants to “go back where they came from”. His shameful flirtation with “macho, control-orientated politics” was a response, he suggests, to his physical inadequacies – not just his small stature, but also the acne which earned him the teenage nickname “Crater Face”. After entering Parliament in 1997, Bercow drifted to the Tory Left, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. As Speaker, he pursued a modernising agenda, boosting the power of backbenchers and establishing a nursery where MPs could drop off their children. What a shame that this “legacy” is now largely forgotten, overshadowed by his contentious role in Brexit and the accusations of bullying levelled against him.

Anyone who has seen Bercow “bloviating from the Speaker’s Chair” will recognise the voice of this book, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer: verbose, repetitive, often “mottled with rage”. Unspeakable is “memoir as both therapy and revenge”: an attempt to get his own back on all those who have crossed him, and a way to show the world just how far “Crater Face” has risen. I felt so ashamed reading this book in public that I had to hide the cover, said Quentin Letts in The Times. “But it does have a value. As an example of auto-hagiography, of extended hypocrisy, of unwitting and damaging self-revelation, it is both unspeakable and unbeatable.”