This vicious, small-minded, careerist martinet of a Speaker
ONE of these two men is an unstable egomaniac with smallish hands and a trophy wife. The other is Donald Trump. One is vain, scornful of convention and reacts to criticism with an intolerance so wild you (wrongly) think he must have had one shandy too many. The other is teetotal Donald Trump.
Given how much they have in common, it may seem odd that the House of Commons Speaker John Bercow thinks so little of the American President.
But in his basic character, Mr Bercow is a mini-Donald.
He is as greedy for attention and has the same, inflated selfregard. He boils with it.
Worst of all, both men appear to calculate that maximum advantage can be had in politics by creating division and hatred.
When asked about her relationship with Trump, our stolid Prime Minister, Theresa May, observed that opposites can attract. By the same measure, people with similar characters often repel one another, as is plainly the case here.
Mr Bercow, in an unprecedented Commons attack on Monday night, flew into a tirade about Mr Trump being racist, sexist and an opponent of the Speaker’s politically correct definition of equality.
Rant
With his red- eyed rant, Speaker Bercow has done several things. He has plunged his high office into controversy and has created an international row which has probably damaged our prospects of doing a post-Brexit trade deal with the Trump White House.
He may also have irked the Queen, who invited Mr Trump in the first place and who expects people at the top of our public life to show better manners to visiting heads of state.
Mr Bercow delighted one side of the Commons (his remarks won a round of applause from the Scots Nats and there was similar partisanship during proceedings yesterday).
Such creation of division along party lines is unhealthy for, if not deadly to, the supposedly impartial post of Speaker.
Most of all, Mr Bercow has secured himself publicity. He has even made it on to the TV news in America. This, for him, will be richly satisfying, possibly in a literal sense. For, due to step down next year, he may be on the hunt for a big international post. This week’s events may in some way have been a job application.
The greatest Speaker in history was William Lenthall, who occupied the Chair during the English Civil War.
Parliament was in open conflict with the Monarchy and Lenthall was a diplomatic and level-headed presence. Had the Speaker at that time been of a more excitable temperament, the Civil War might have been even bloodier than it was.
It was Lenthall who blocked Charles I as he tried to enter the Commons with some heavies, demanding to know the whereabouts of some MPs who had criticised him.
He clearly intended those men harm. Lenthall, with dignity and bravery, knelt before the furious Monarch and said: ‘May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.’
That moment encapsulated not only the independence of the Commons from the Crown, but also the limitations of the Speakership. Parliamentarians had their own power; the Speaker, as an individual, had none.
He was merely the servant of the people’s representatives and they, in theory, were the servants of the electorate. It is hard to read Mr Bercow’s conduct as a continuation of that vital tradition. What we saw was a politician ambitious for attention and driven by childish anger.
He had seen Michael Gove (who he has long despised) secure a major interview with Mr Trump in New York. He had seen Mrs May (whom he little likes) then triumph in Washington. Did he decide to plunge a stick in their wheels?
The words he spoke were not the dry, calm verdict of a semijudicial veteran assembling the facts of the matter or seeking to reduce the public temperature. They were markedly more personal and incendiary.
Yesterday, Mr Bercow claimed that he was within his rights to speak out against Mr Trump. That is questionable.
At very least he snubbed Buckingham Palace. More seriously, he failed to represent the settled will of the Commons.
He was off-piste, blatantly so, and it was not just Tory MPs who were appalled. Some Labour Members were queasy about his behaviour.
Perhaps Labour sensed that he has become unhealthily close to their sworn foes, the Scottish Nationalists.
Of course, this is not the first scrape the Speaker has landed himself in. The surest way to analyse John Bercow has always been through the prism of his character.
If his Speakership is remembered chiefly for its rancour and rudeness, that will only be a reflection of his unhappy, politically rootless, itchy personality.
High-minded commentators sometimes lecture us that it is wrong to make too much of the personal in politics, but in the case of men so vivid and unpredictable as Mr Bercow (and, for that matter, Mr Trump), that becomes impossible.
This is a creature driven by molten moods and door-kicking tantrums. Philosophy really has little to do with his politics.
Having observed Mr Bercow closely since he became an MP in 1997, I was not surprised by his performance on Monday.
Exploited
Throughout his career, John Bercow has happily exploited sulphurous disagreements to buttress his personal position.
He did that in his early days as a Tory activist, when he was an objectionable oik in the racist Monday Club.
Young Bercow was a Uriah Heap-like hanger-on to Rightwing grotesques. These men taught this taxi-driver’s son to speak with a plum in his mouth — something that accentuates the impression he is a fake.
It has been said that the youthful Bercow once led a ‘Hang Mandela’ campaign.
Having entered the Commons as an unpleasant Rightie, Bercow (whose Buckingham seat is in the Tory heartlands) saw his prospects were limited and realised he needed to change his uncouth views to prosper.
Views yes, character no. Shedding pretty much his whole Conservative persona would certainly help him win Labour support for the Speakership.
He did this by mocking MPs on his own side and by sucking up to the politically- correct wing of the Labour Party. His posturing would have put a peacock to shame.
Harriet Harman, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband & Co. saw what was going on and shrewdly went along with it as a way of destabilising the Tories.
Rudeness
His chance came when Labour’s Michael Martin was drummed out of the Speakership in 2009 as the highestprofile victim of the MPs’ expenses scandal (thanks not least to manoeuvring by Bercow). Subsequently, Bercow swept into the job thanks to the Labour Whips.
Some of us had warned that he was a wrong ’un, but we were ignored. Lo and behold, he was soon being criticised for bias against the Tories and there were horror stories about his nastiness to his staff. Thus has it continued. Mr Bercow has been extravagant with public money, spending thousands on foreign travel and on taxis. He has inserted his little favourites on committees.
He has shown extraordinary tolerance of the disgraced Labour MP Keith Vaz and has treated less favoured MPs with lacerating rudeness.
His marital life with the lurid Sally, who is just as addicted to self-promotion as him, has also been a dreadful mess.
And, with his ban on Trump, he’s unprecedentedly involved the Speakership in foreign policy, and an area linked to the most controversial domestic policy of all, Brexit.
Alas, this will leave White House officials seeing that their new President, already besieged by the shrieking international Left, has now been insulted by the Speaker of the British House of Commons.
All the good vibes of Theresa May’s Washington visit may have been forgotten. Vital diplomatic work may have been trashed. All because this vicious, careerist, small-minded martinet felt like getting something off his preening chest.