John Bercow, amateur tennis player (Photo credit should read TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)
Last year I had the pleasure of reading John Bercow’s memoirs, the appropriately titled Unspeakable. It is, to be fair to the former House of Commons Speaker, a remarkable book, if only for the things it revealed about him; his vindictiveness, his spite, his preening vanity and his curious tendency to tell the truth only when left with no other option. Indeed, so ghastly was his self-portrait that it left me wondering: how long until he tries to force his way back?
Suffice it to say, then, that Bercow’s brief re-emergence into public view this week hardly came as a surprise. It all started on Sunday, when he told the Observer that he had joined the Labour Party. The story made the newspaper’s front page, even though his transfer of allegiance was hardly a surprise. Personally, I had expected it to happen 14 years ago, in June 2007.
That was when the news broke that a Conservative MP had been so enamoured and enthused by the prospect of Gordon Brown’s move from Number 11 to Number 10 Downing Street that he had chosen to cross the floor of the House.
The minute I heard the news I assumed it must be the then MP for Buckingham, John Bercow — a man who had already adopted the most ingratiating manner imaginable whenever he spoke across the Commons floor from the government of Tony Blair. He oozed and schmoozed and exuded a pseudo-charm devoid of wit and without much discernible purpose.
On that occasion, however, the Conservative MP who crossed the floor was Quentin Davies. John Bercow had missed his chance. Or so it seemed.
Why would a former member of the Monday Club give it all up to join a beleaguered Labour Party? The most plausible reason is, as so often, a personal one.
In 2002 Bercow married a Labour Party activist called Sally, and it is clear from his memoirs that it was a transformative match. The unattractive, dwarfish Bercow could not believe his luck at bagging a tall, leggy blonde several times his height. He spent the ensuing period not just counting his luck but trying to make sure that he continued to dazzle her, principally by adapting his politics to fit hers: a strategy that turned out to be largely unsuccessful.
In any case, during his time as Speaker, Bercow’s political sympathies were clear. The famous side-eye that David Cameron frequently gave him was well-earned, as was the amused acceptance of his charms by successive Labour front-benchers who accepted the fealty and fawning of the man in the speaker’s chair with much the same good humour as an organ-grinder regarding his monkey.
But now the monkey in question has been caught in a lie. While giving an interview on Sunday to Sky News, Bercow presented his decision to join Labour as though it were solely a question of principle. “The real issue”, he insisted, “is who has the vision of a more equitable society, who thirsts to deliver social mobility, who wants to better the lot of people less fortunate? On that, Keir Starmer is vastly preferable to Boris Johnson.”
It was classic Bercow, of course. Who honestly uses the word “thirsts” in relation to “social mobility”? The excellent Trevor Phillips, who was interviewing him, wasn’t convinced. Was this not all about something else entirely? Was his decision to switch to Labour simply a calculation to get around the Conservative Party’s clear refusal to put him in the House of Lords by throwing in his lot with Labour?
Bercow, however, was in high dudgeon at such a low motive being attributed to him.
“I’ve had absolutely no discussion whatsoever, either with Keir Starmer or any other member of the Labour leadership about that matter. There has been no barter, no trade, no deal whatsoever. And if I may very politely say so, and I do, the people who make what they think is that potent and coruscating criticism of me are operating according to their own rather low standards.”
Again, it was classic Bercow: grandiose, self-sanitising, pompous and untrue — as we were to discover not more than 24 hours later, when The Times published a letter which Bercow had written to Jeremy Corbyn while he was still Labour leader. It proved to be just one part of the former Speaker’s campaign to lobby Corbyn, having been preceded by a number of secret meetings with the Labour leader in the aftermath of the 2019 election.
It might have been possible for Bercow to present the Times emails as forgeries, were it not for their all-too-predictable style. For example, in his explanation for his suitability for the Upper House, Bercow boasted that he had held “no fewer than five shadow ministerial roles”. It was typical Bercow self-praise. All of these roles were performed in remarkably quick succession, during a tumultuous, talent-short period of Conservative opposition. And all were performed by Bercow without any distinction.
Then came the clincher — the absolute proof that this was not the creation of a Russian forgery operation or the like. Bercow, in his exhaustive account of his political career, went on to explain that not only had he once served as deputy leader of the Tory group on Lambeth council, but he is “a qualified lawn tennis coach”. Anyone who has read Unspeakable — and I appreciate that we are few — will immediately hear the clear ring of truth in this last boast.
Why should that preclude him from the House of Lords? It is true, of course, that the Upper Chamber contains some remarkably unimpressive figures. But only John Bercow, in the full flight of his seriousness, would imagine that what the Lords needs is an amateur tennis coach. No foreign agent could have inserted this detail. No critic of the former Speaker within the Conservative or Labour parties could have fabricated it. It is John Bercow through and through. A year later, he remains as unspeakable as ever.
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SubscribeThe problem that I have with articles of this kind is that I have no idea how the author defines certain terms. What exactly is it to be far right, online right or alt-right? They seem to be terms that mean whatever you want them to mean to fit the occasion, though I note that they are often used merely as terms of abuse to be deployed against those who disagree with you on some issue or other, whether or not that issue has any real political dimension. We seem to be living at a time when political debate has been debased to the point where it consists of meaningless noise. As for Roger Scruton, the great man should be left in peace.
Couldn’t agree more.
I could not read her tripe after the first couple paragraphs. Left wing liberal butterfly trapped in her bubble and no idea of the real world outside… the bogeyman ‘Far Right’ of her imagination being conjured up. Another witch-finder General, witches may not exist in reality – but these guys will still find them and tell us all about the danger of them….
I have access to OpenAI, a site where you can access very impressive Artificial Intelligence software for experimentation and product development. One thing you can do with this is to write a story. The basic idea is that you provide some starting sentences, and then the software writes the following sentence(s). You then add the next sentence, and the software adds another sentence, ad infinitum. If you first start using it it is quite uncanny how these stories unfold. Very, very, impressive. Since it comes from a program that absorbed trillions of facts, I had the assumption that the underlying facts & logic were irreproachable. I was wrong, the stories tend to be surprisingly nonsensical. (It works amazingly for fiction though.)
This article closely resembles such a session.
As a test, I used the first sentence (bold) of the article as a seed:
Quite amazing how the AI finds the same tone of voice … and how utterly ridiculous the statement is upon reflection.
A perfect summary of the article.
Crikey!
You should do this for all Unherd articles. Sort the wheat from the chaff!
Honest people with some knowledge in programming or computer science will find this comment nonsensical, while other people may find it powerful because they get intimidated by it.
The demand for Far Right (to validate the far left?) continues to exceed the supply, even after scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Right wing:
– Take some fringe nutters
– Call them “far right”
– Conflate routine conservative views with the second called “far right”
– Malign all conservatives as supposedly backward
BLM, Islam, democrats etc:
– Those involved in violence, terror acts, grooming gangs, joining ISIS are “radicals”
– Somehow those radicals are viewed separately from “normal” members of the group: even though those “normal” share the same views and support their tactics
– Absolve those groups of all blame. “Not all XYZ do that, you phobic / racist etc”
Nazism (and therefore neo-Nazism) is the far left, not the far right. Confusing the right with the left may explain some of the author’s other surprising claims.
Nazis accepted private property and valued things like loyalty to the nation and heroism. They cooperated with the capitalists who incidentally still for the most part exist today as they did back then (e.g. Siemens paid a large sum of money to the descendants of the slave labourers they used at the time). Given these, I’d argue Nazis were part of a “progressive-right” which doesn’t exist in explicit form today as far as I know. In that sense, there’s probably an argument to be made that today’s Progressives while including parts of the identitarian left are concealing a progressive-right element within. The subtext of this earlier article, in my view, may have been about that:
https://unherd.com/2021/12/why-macron-is-a-superman/
I’m not surprised that this is happening. In their embrace of managerialism, feminism and sexual politics, Western societies have become simultaneously decadent and boringly safe. Young men need ways in which to prove themselves and our societies no longer provide this. I even think it’s safe to say that many boys these days are raised in an environment that acts passively aggressive toward them. Corridors of upward social mobility are being closed off to them, and even a college degree is no longer a surefire ticket to a fulfilling career.
A society that turns against its men should not be surprised when its men turn their backs to it. Many educated people believe that Judaeo-Christian patriarchic norms were originally put in place to control women. That may be true to a degree, but they were mostly there to encourage masculine virtues like honor, kindness, gentleness, and self-sacrifice upon which women could safely rely upon to raise a family.
There is some nefarious zeitgeist in the West that hates tough-minded men and would rather that they gaze self-absorbedly into a mirror while crying about not being born into the correct body and wasting their lives away on ‘fixing’ themselves.
Great article. Denying the spiritual dimension is disastrous. We are dependent on metaphysics as much as air, food and water given our inability to comprehend the origin, purpose and meaning of existence. Rationality and science are nowhere near enough on their own.
Your point becomes more obvious by each passing day. I pray for the reformation.
Thanks for the interesting and nicely written article. I’d take issue with the last few sentences. I’ve never had the impression that conservatism even slightly excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Especialy not on a grassroots level. One of the main reasons Unherd is now my fave news site is that a substantial portion of the mostly conservative commenators here (BTL, but also some of the feature writers) are staunch defenders of the sacred.
Id agree it would be great if there was more re-sanctification / re-invigoratoin of the sacred by high profile conservatives (& LW politicians for that matter.) Youtuber Scott Mannion is great on the practical details of what this means. But I’d think even if all the leading lights got in on this, extreme Islam would still be attractive to some on the alt right. For example, even back in 2019 when I was looking at incel forums, I saw near majority respect for extreme Islam from the forum members, and this apparently had nothing to do with the sacred (I seem to remeber their own internal polls showed about 90% of them were unbelievers). It was more related to their view that without controling social forces like fundementalist religion, low status men are much more likely to miss out on sex and love. PS – not trying to say all incels are all alt right – some of them are even socialists, but there does seem to be considerable overlap.
I really liked this article for its clarity of the concepts it discusses – kudos to Unherd for finding such talented writers as Ms. Partridge. The key point the author makes for me is the astute observation that, Islam appears to have the strongest backbone in the West (particularly the English speaking West) for pushing back against Enlightenment narratives – both liberal and (left-wing) progressive.
Earlier I was taken by surprise reading Unherd founder Paul Marshal’s article taking the stance in standing up for the (pre-Enlightenment) Christian tradition as Roger Scruton might have (reading this article now).
An interesting cross-road here may be whether Christianity can find an accommodation with Islam (and vice versa). Consider that Islam wasn’t always seen with such hostility in conservative circles. Muslims were seen as the trustworthy citizens of the empire in colonial India. Muslim lands have been invaded by Westerners, their resources (e.g. oil) effectively commandeered, and just looking at the past few decades an astonishing number of civilians have been killed and written off as collateral damage in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq even to this very day in some cases. With pax-Americana on the back foot, we no longer hear about the “Global war on terror”, therefore the demonisation of the Muslims has ended. With Wokeism on the rise, one is more likely to hear about Islamophobia than Islamist terror in main stream media which is such a change to 10-20 years ago. An unexpected side-effect of this may end up being the rehabilitation of the Muslim.
Interesting question you ask about whether the two Religions can find an accommodation. However, as long as fundamental Islam is preached, I can not envision a path to that outcome. It’s hard to live side by side a massive group of people who literally believe the other is an infidel and must be eliminated.
Very interesting, well written, thought provoking piece. Thankyou.
Looking for traditional ideas in the mainstream culture or politics might be possible in Poland. They march in great numbers there for God and family there. In Dublin, Ireland, in a city square, a sea of young ladies greeted with enthusiasm the result of the abortion referendum there a few years ago. Not a hijab-wearing lady in sight (as one might predict with great confidence). A sea of indigenous young ladies saluting progress was the news footage beamed around the world. Dare anyone else young there disagree with them! I could not imagine such a cheerful reaction in Catholic Poland, even if an abortion referendum were held there and passed. Has there been? The one Irish county that had tainted things by voting against abortion, Donegal, was put down to the fact that its young people had left that remote and peaty place in order to find work — with the result that the presumed backward old-timers that were left made up the bulk of the voters.
The article here by E Partridge is a very thoughtful piece. The defence of the sacred, or even the culture of speaking up for it, must not be allowed to drift off or be scorned as backward and ancient in these supposedly enlightening times.
Perhaps the Taliban are patting each other on the back, crying out “Now we’re going places!” The fringe far-right elements who have, as the piece here puts it, misappropriated the unmoored and drifting-downstream ideological debris of devalued Western or conservative traditional values, are also doubtless patting each other on the back. They see themselves as “the boys” now. They may envy the Taliban as already men. A sneaking regard for them.
The EU is seemingly working on how to make Christmas more invisible. It has recently had to go back to the drawing board, its tail between its legs. But it is determined to succeed here.
No doubt the Right and the Left are both as eager as each other to forget Christmas once the January sales begin. Or, in America, after Thanksgiving, when Black Friday begins.
What a world, eh?