From Monday Club to darling of the 48% (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

âWrite as you speakâ is the advice Saul Bellow gave to Allan Bloom. It had been passed on to writers both before and since, but after Unspeakable: The Autobiography it is clear that a caveat should be added: âUnless you are John Bercow.â Only weeks after retiring from his position as Speaker of the House of Commons here he is back, in book form, writing with those same ticks, ingratiations and sub-Gilbert and Sullivan witticisms that we might have hoped would have disappeared with the last Parliament.
On page one we discover that âIn Parliament, naturally and properly, everything said is recorded and published verbatim.â A page later we learn that âpredictably, and perfectly properly, the Attorney General saidâŚâ Two pages on and we can read of how âI therefore intervened good-naturedly, saying âI do not normally offer stylistic advice to the Attorney General, but his tendency to perambulate while prating is disagreeable to the House.ââ A witticism that I am sure readers will (both good-naturedly and perfectly properly) be grateful to the former Speaker for capturing between hard covers.
The audience for this book is anyone eager to relive the glory days of the 2019 Parliament: anyone keen to reminiscence about what happened when Parliament was prorogued and then de-prorogued. The difference this time is that it can all be refracted through the lens of John Bercowâs own personal views, which had previously been a mystery.
So the reader can be reminded of that day last year when Parliament reconvened and Geoffrey Cox referred to a matter that âin advocacy termsâ is âwhat we used to call a âwhen did you stop beating your wife?â question.â But here we have an added editorial. Of this comment Bercow writes, âThe reference to the âwhen did you stop beating your wife?â question rightly went down extremely badly in the House, especially but not only with female colleagues.â
While examples of othersâ verbal malpractice abound, it is to the authorâs credit and the readerâs good fortune that an example is always on hand to showcase best practice. Through tense times our guide remains resolute. âWhat I was not prepared to do was to behave hypocritically,â he informs the reader. âThe abuse of power was foiled, but make no mistake. That is precisely what it was: an abuse of power.â And again, âIt was never any part of my role to serve as a nodding donkey or quiescent lickspittle of the executive branch of our political system.â
Happily Unspeakable is not just a blow-by-blow account of last autumn. It is also the story of how John Bercow came to be the man he almost is. We learn of his parentage, of how his maternal grandmother was said to have had a brief affair with âa local toffâ who âpromptly scarpered, offering not a penny piece to support her in the raising of my mother, Brenda.â
We learn of his schooldays, of how young John played the recorder âwithout distinctionâ but excelled at tennis and politics. How different the history of politics â not to mention recorder playing â might have been had such talents been reversed. We also learn of how, at Finchley Manorhill, the young Bercow was struck down by acne. âAt first, it was a modest affliction â I would apply a cream and the problem would go.â Later gels and âliquid solutionsâ were proffered, but the problem did not go away. âIt festered. It intensified.â Rarely has a workâs better subtitle hidden in such plain sight.
It is with a certain inevitability that this youth found his way into 1980s party activism. The combination of ambition and resentment hurtled him into the Finchley branch of the Conservatives, where perhaps his zeal was a tad overzealous. He describes how in January 1981 he âmade a fateful political choiceâ and âthe most shameful decision I have ever made. I applied to join the Monday Club, a hard-Right Conservative pressure group that had been set up in the 1960s.â The groupâs policies included support for minority rule in what was then Rhodesia, a stance with which the Thatcher government â âI later came to believe, both justly and wiselyâ â disagreed.
Yet whatever the missteps, the ambition made up for them, and by the time the decade was out the thrusting young Right-winger was on the up â only for the fates to choose this moment to take a run at him.
At âa large dinnerâ in Nottingham around the time of the 1992 election, organised by the Conservative Students conference, Bercow met a tall young blonde woman âwho was looking more than a little boredâ. This lady who he feared was âway out of my leagueâ turned out to be one Sally Illman. Unfortunately she was already moving to the Left and rejected his early wooing attempts, reportedly viewing the young Bercow as âfar too staidâ. Over the ensuing years he worked on two uncomplementary projects: one was advancing within the Conservative Party. The other was advancing on the woman who would become Sally Bercow.
Although he occasionally tries to suggest there were hurdles, during these years the partyâs support for Bercow was remarkable. Its desire to find him a Parliamentary seat was so considerable that before the 1997 election he was actually helicoptered from one constituency association audition to another. This worked, and in 1997 he ran as the Conservative candidate in the safe seat of Buckingham and retained the seat for the party.
But in the wider country the Blairite era had begun. And as the mores of the time changed and the wellsprings of power shifted, so Bercowâs politics strangely shifted too. The former firebrand of the Monday Club became obsessed with Left-wing social justice, racial issues, LGBT equality and the importance of âdiversityâ.
Having alienated the leadership of his own party throughout the 2000s, he made the wise decision to suck up to any and all members of the party opposite, which happened to be the party of government. His questions to the government benches became positively adoring.
And so a decade after his eyes first locked level with her knees, Bercow finally proved himself worthy to marry Ms Illman. Of his own attractions he remained clear-eyed: âI am not good-looking, but rather rat-like and somewhat intense.â Yet he is generous enough to recognise his own virtues: âI do not panic, get tongue-tied or descend into umm-ing and ah-ing in responding to questions.â
In 2009 Michael Martin stepped down and it was the Conservativesâ turn to nominate a Speaker. Labour were more than happy to elect to the post someone from the Conservative benches who they knew was loathed by his own party. So to the Speakerâs chair Bercow was dragged, and there he sat and reigned for 11 glorious years.
All humiliations behind him, today he stands at the summit of national and international affairs, a vantage point from which he is able to pass judgement on the whole carnival that has passed before him. Doing his bit to earn out his publisherâs advance he declares David Cameron to be âinsubstantialâ, an âopportunist lightweightâ and âa 24-carat snobâ.
William Hague he calls âimpersonal, mechanical, an upmarket, efficient hack â and an ex-teenage nerd who as a schoolboy had pored over parliamentary debatesâ. Terms in which the teenage Bercow could never be described.
Now that the modernising speakerâs gown is off, the venom is continuous and one-directional. He claims that Toby Youngâs views show him to be âa misogynist who also held deplorable views about gays, the disabled and the poorâ. He describes Theresa May as âwooden as your average coffee table, a worthy public servant but as dull as ditch-waterâ. Michael Gove is âoleaginousâ while Boris Johnson is variously described as âdisingenuousâ, guilty of being âaccused of bigotryâ and âat his occasional best, a passably adequate politician in an age not replete with themâ.
Newspaper editors who ever ran anything critical about the silly and self-destructive Sally are dismissed as âsnobs and chauvinistsâ. By the bookâs end Bercow is lashing out in all directions like a schoolboy in the playground trying the âwindmillâ manoeuvre with his arms circling wildly against larger foes. He dismisses the Conservative party membership who gave him his career as being â in their totality â âelderly and extremeâ. Anyone who ever expressed criticism of him ends up being dismissed as âbigotedâ.
His positively pontifical reviews of world leaders who spoke in Parliament during his tenure extend to an actual Pope â Benedict XVI. He quotes Sallyâs criticism of the former Cardinal Ratzinger that he had among other things been reluctant âto come clean about his involvement in the Hitler Youth as a young Germanâ.
Nevertheless one learns a number of things from Bercowâs exegesis of Benedictâs Westminster speech: âThe Popeâs stance â which of course reflected that of the Catholic ChurchâŚâ On Benedict, Bercow continues, âPerfectly reasonably, he spoke in English, but his delivery was uninspiring.â How sad that neither Sally or John chose to give a pep talk to the pontiff.
Perhaps all this makes Bercow sound ungenerous, and yet he is reliably effusive in his estimations of his self. Frequent examples are given of his own witticisms. âSometimes I would just say, âWe have got the gistâ, âI think a question mark is coming nowâ, or âThe abridged rather than the War and Peace version would be appreciatedâ.â
âWhether I was a good Speaker is not for me to say,â he concedes at one point. But analysing the various pros and cons of his years in the chair, on balance he writes âIt is only fair to recall that, alongside the complainants, many constituents professed themselves perfectly happy⌠I could not please everyone but I must have been doing something right.â
Any time that Parliament has an opportunity to praise the Speaker the results are quoted. âOf all the Speakers who have sat in the Speakerâs Chair since I was elected, he is the bestâ is one quote from Harriet Harman that Bercow feels compelled to save from the dustheap of Hansard. He also unexpectedly finds himself innocent of all bullying charges against himself, including one about which he writes, âIn my opinion, the disagreement between us did not constitute bullying in any way.â Which â perhaps predictably and even properly â must surely constitute an end to the matter.
Unspeakable is an autobiography and so charges that it is self-serving are unfair. But the work does provide an opportunity to survey and summarise for ourselves â as all autobiographies must (look how addictive this style is) â whatever the life of its subject amounts to.
To this observer it is clear that perhaps there once was a John Bercow. An ambitious, thrusting, embittered person he became an avatar of ambition for whatever age he found himself in. In one era he thought it advantageous to believe one thing. When the mores changed the same person found himself hammering his fists just as vociferously for another cause.
The best evidence of his fundamental absence lies not in his actions but in that one constant give-away: his language. Not just the caveats and quibbles or the odious, affected flourishes and archaisms, but a whole language and manner into which the man so deeply dug his life that he eventually stood no hope of extracting himself.
There is footage somewhere online of Bercow caught by a reporter in the streets of London last year. Bercow is in his civvies. Yet he immediately slips into that strange register into which his life has become caught: all menacing jollity and forced, frustrated badinage.
After reading his life story the reader is left with an impression of a man who has spent his life doing an impression of a man. Whatever else once existed long-ago disappeared in a small puff of unwise, and probably improper, self-regard.
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