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What is it about the Berc? Self-made, bright, non-Oxbridge Tory, impeccable moderniser — and the new Conservative Speaker many Tories are out to destroy.
Holding the phone a few inches from my ear, I listen to one prominent member of the front bench team describing his colleague in the Commons chair. “He is psychologically flawed, rude, arrogant and will say or do absolutely anything for his own advancement,” he begins. “And he has zero judgment,” adds another. “He's like the kind of manipulative and appalling politician you see in TV thrillers: except he's much worse morally and very rude with it.”
Outside Westminster, people might well wonder quite what all the fuss is about: Mr Bercow is photographed looking cheerfully diminutive, next to his leggy wife Sally, winsome toddler alongside in pushchair.
The Bercows are the most unlikely new power couple at Westminster: inheritors of the Speaker's perks and lavish apartment — and the sole career beneficiary of the expenses scandal which swept away his doddering Labour predecessor.
A Conservative Speaker elected largely with Labour votes, Mr Bercow owes his rise to parliamentary machinations by Labour to saddle the Cameronians with a figure they know is widely loathed on his own side. Rarely can a man have got so far by being so ardently disliked.
The Berc, I can attest, having known him for nearly 20 years, is a victim of his own tendency to say publicly what many others would not be caught dead saying even in private. Quite frequently, those things change rather abruptly, but the volume and intensity rarely diminish.
When he questioned David Cameron's fitness to lead the party on the grounds that he was a privileged old Etonian who dined at White's club, he was reflecting the uneasy divide between meritocrats and the priviligentsia that still lurks among the new Tories.
Mr Cameron really does not like to be teased on those grounds — hence his jibe to one Labour member who told him he had never voted Tory until he voted for Bercow: “That doesn't count.”
It is, however, the willowy and mysterious figure of Mrs Bercow who most bemuses and fascinates many of his colleagues. An advertising executive before taking time out with their three children, Ms Illman campaigned for Tony Blair in 1997.
Is she really a Mata Hari, seducing her once staunchly Right-wing husband to cast off his old social conservatism and support such red rags to the blue bull as gay adoption, a lower age of gay consent — and, most oddly, welcoming Harriet Harman's equality legislation, which even New Labour deems to be too politically correct to swallow with any enthusiasm?
“The trouble with John,” says one of his colleagues, “is he discovered sex and Labour at the same time.” From the Right-wing fringes of the Monday Club (he supported repatriation, he told me, out of “concern” for the inner cities), he recanted and has been moving Leftwards ever since. Girlfriends were conspicuous by their absence: politics and, crucially, parliament fascinated him and reflected his capacious memory and appetite for detail.
I remember visiting him in his bachelor flat in Marsham Street, a shrine to Margaret Thatcher (he had his picture taken with her) and huge stacks of pamphlets.
He greeted me in his navy-blue blazer with gold buttons — and I did fall to wondering if there would ever be a Mrs Bercow. Ms Illman has, however, undoubtedly played a role in introducing him to a set of assumptions outside a policy-obsessed Tory circle. She's outspoken, a touch brash, even: and still an outsider among the glossy but compliant Tory wives. The couple have three children including one with special needs.
She ticked him off for an ill-judged attack on Cherie Blair, pointing out that he would be seen to alienate working women. Illman is not shy to project herself in heels and short skirts. “I'm tall, John's not,” she tells friends. “They can just get over it.” So no resort to Carla Bruni flats to spare the blushes of her other half.
Her politics are not exactly consistently Labour, as the bitter tearoom gossip has it. She met Mr Bercow at a student Conservative event, when he was in the company of Julian Lewis, one of the most Right-wing members of parliament: Lewis suggested the couple get together.
But many Conservatives thought she was a moving force in Mr Bercow's courtship of Labour a couple of years ago. “There was a time she would have liked to see John on the other benches,” says one friend. “But then there were a lot of political wives feeling the same way as the Tories languished.” But he harvested a lot of ill-feeling by appearing to collude too readily with the Government on socially liberal issues. he's Cameron's worst nightmare, really, a moderniser who takes it to extremes.
So how close did he come to floor-crossing? “Nearly full intimacy,” says a senior Labour source. “He was finally weighing it up just as the tide turned, he's more useful where he is!” That is an impression he will have to strive to dispel: he cannot afford a row about partiality to add to the drawbacks of his CGT avoidance and unedifying membership of the league of Commons house-flippers.
The Seventies haircut and academic garb he chose for his outing in the Speaker's chair sent shudders through the well-suited, super-groomed Conservative ranks. “Now you know how we felt about Michael Martin,” quipped one slick New Labourite.
Is it a class thing? You bet. There is something about him that makes Cameronians want to revert to the old language, too. “He's an oik,” says one. “I know I shouldn't say it but he really is.” Others mutter about anti-Semitism at work in the extreme reaction: his father was a Jewish minicab driver. But the Tory party has a long history of absorbing intelligent Jewish figures, from Disraeli to Oliver Letwin. A sense that he is beyond normal restraint of the political tribe and an allergy to his considerable egotism is more fundamental.
But Bercow is bright and feisty. We found ourselves, a few years ago, on Any Questions?, facing a dourly hostile Northumbrian audience, with a nervous pager-reading Labour panellist and a gloomy mood afterwards about how badly we had gone down with the audience. He was the one to stoke conversation in the pub and start to win over the locals. Is he a devious, self-obessed politician? Of course he is. Just a lot more up-front about it than the rest. Caliban in the glass.
Reader views (1)
"new power couple"?
I thought he got the job. Will his wife fill in then if he is sick?
Just as well he is now speaker and has no voting rights with his Labour Lefty views wrapped in the blue of conservatism.
- Frank, Home Counties, England., 25/06/2009 11:08
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