Bercow makes Alan Partridge look self-aware
Everyone is to blame apart from our hero, who handles things ‘remarkably well’
The title of this volume of memoirs hints at a degree of selfknowledge previously unknown in its author. Alas, there is nothing between its covers which suggests that John Bercow is capable of reflecting on his career with insight or honesty, let alone shame or embarrassment. It is published amid fresh allegations about Bercow’s bullying of House of Commons staff which were conveniently ignored so long as he was the hero of anti-Brexit forces. This week, his former employer rebuked him for naming alleged victims in his book, which is written in a peerlessly oafish style. Peerlessly being the operative word. Poor old Bercow has accused the Prime Minister of blocking his elevation to the Lords despite a “centuries-old convention” that former Speakers are made peers. That’s rich coming from a man who performed Kama-Sutra-style constitutional contortions so Remainer MPs could have their way with the British electorate. Oddly, the autobiography that Unspeakable most reminded me of is I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan. Like Alan Partridge, Bercow is a brilliant comic creation, a monster of self-satisfaction given to glutinous praise towards allies who pose no threat and vengeful asides about those who do. That brilliant, authentic Yorkshireman William Hague is patronised as “a rather buttoned-up character, geeky, frankly a bit nerdy”. (Bercow can’t hide his glee when the Tories under Hague do badly.) He knows that he is “frankly detested” by David Cameron and the “Notting Hill Set” but he puts that down to snobbery rather than good judgment. On one occasion, he reports that Hague said of him: “When is he going to join the human race?” But he still doesn’t get it. Everyone is to blame except our hero. In true Partridge fashion, Bercow tells the reader about chaotic events for which he was often responsible, always concluding that he handled things remarkably well. Here he is on the debate of September 25 last year, which followed the Supreme Court ruling against the prorogation of Parliament: “I gently but firmly underlined the premium placed by Erskine May on moderation and good humour in the use of language.” Gently but firmly? Moderation and good humour? The House of Commons was a bear pit that day. Emboldened by the fact that the law lords had dealt a blow to Brexit, MPs bayed at the Prime Minister, aided and abetted by their ringmaster-in-chief, his legs dangling from the Speaker’s Chair, his puce face contorted. Recalling that day, Bercow now tuts: “Neither Geoffrey Cox [the Attorney General] nor Boris Johnson offered the slightest scintilla of contrition or remorse.” John Bercow was born in January 1963. His father, a thwarted barrister turned second-hand-car salesman, was a hanging-and-flogging Conservative who adored Enoch Powell and “would never use one word where one hundred would do and I have inherited that prolixity”. We hear less of Bercow’s mother, Brenda, a Yorkshire cub reporter, who soon wearied of her prolix husband. They divorced in the early Seventies. Bercow had an undistinguished school career (he wasn’t entered for the 11 Plus) but was “intensely competitive and appalled by defeat”. A useful tennis player, for a while he thought about becoming a coach, then went to Essex University, where he became “addicted” to politics. He joined the Conservative Party’s far-Right Monday Club, “the most shameful decision I have ever made … even more inexplicably came my appalling decision to join the club’s Immigration, Repatriation and Race Relation Industry subcommittee”. Apart from his stature, the defining feature of Bercow’s adolescence was acne. Kids at his comprehensive school called him “Crater Face”. In this early chapter, the most readable in the book, Bercow senses, but cannot fully articulate, the long-term psychological damage it caused him. “I have sometimes wondered whether my own physical inadequacies led me to embrace such an aggressive, macho, control-orientated politics.” Short, scarred and highly driven, it’s easy to see how Bercow developed a Napoleon complex. A seething, unappeasable anger runs through this autobiography. He was good enough at the machinery of politics to land himself the safe Tory seat of Buckingham at the age of 34, but admits he had no thoughts of making Britain a better place. Nor was there much time for a personal life. On and off, for years, Bercow went out with the tall, blonde, “wild” Sally, a Tory who converted to New Labour and chided her “young fogey” boyfriend. The unlikely couple finally tied the knot in 2002 and Sally went on to achieve notoriety for posing in just a bedsheet when they moved into Speaker’s House, and for having an affair with Bercow’s cousin. Who can blame her? Bercow offers no convincing explanation for his remarkable shift from the far-Right, Powellworshipping wing of his party to a point where he was asked by Ed Miliband to join Labour because “you’re far too progressive for them”. The reader is forced to conclude that, having burnt his boats with his own side, John “I am not a team player” Bercow cultivated the views and friends most likely to secure him the post of Speaker. What an unutterable disaster he was in that role, and at a point in our history when the impartiality and restraining hand of the Speaker was sorely needed. Bercow says he set out to be a moderniser (reforms such as introducing a nursery for MPs’ children were beneficial) but, by the time he left, Parliament’s reputation as an out-of-touch asylum for the terminally arrogant and deluded was firmly cemented in the public imagination. Having read this book, I’m afraid it is all too easy to believe that Bercow’s choleric and vindictive conduct in the chair carried on behind the scenes. His good-humoured, quietly efficient successor, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has just asked for anyone bullied by Bercow to come forward. There may be quite a queue. Ever delighted with himself, Bercow concludes: “In over a decade in the chair it was never any part of my role to serve as a nodding donkey or quiescent lickspittle of the executive branch of our political system.” Oh, do shut up, you preposterous little man. Napoleon was exiled to Elba. Where should we send John Bercow and his Napoleon complex – Rockall, Malin, the Hebrides? As far away as possible, please, and take your dreadful book with you.