UNSPEAKABLE
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
JOHN BERCOW
W&N, 438pp, £20
Reviewers reading former Speaker John Bercow’s autobiography mostly found that the memoir was appositely titled. Quentin Letts, writing in the Times, said that when he finished it, he felt ‘physically dirty. When reading it on trains, I hid the cover from shame. But it does have a value. As an example of autohagiography, of extended hypocrisy, of unwitting and damaging selfrevelation it is both unspeakable and unbeatable.’ Stephen Bush writing in the New Statesman was scarcely more measured; the book lacks ‘reflection – and an unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to take others with him on his intellectual journey’ making for ‘an unsatisfying memoir of his time in office’.
Allison Pearson, in the Telegraph, found that a ‘seething, unappeasable anger runs through this autobiography’. It is written by a ‘preposterous little man’. While Patrick Kidd, writing for
Politicshome, felt that the problem for Bercow was that ‘his own leaders failed to recognise his greatness’. Bercow is coruscating about his political colleagues, and reminded Kidd of the fictional broadcaster Alan Partridge, who also wrote a selfserving autobiography in which every anecdote ended with the phrase ‘needless to say, I had the last laugh’. Andrew Rawnsley, in the
Guardian, perceived two motives: ‘this is memoir as both therapy and revenge. Vengeance on all those who have crossed him during a contentious career. Therapy by trumpeting to the world that “Crater Face” [as a youth he suffered from acne] defied those bullying classmates by rising to occupy parliament’s high chair for a decade.’