Sally Bercow: 'Two bottles a day, one-night stands, my life was out of control'

Anne McElvoy
04.12.09

Sally Bercow is a household name whom no one knows much about apart from a row about her CV and her redecorating tastes at the Speaker's apartment.

"It's my first ever interview," she says, twiddling silver jewellery nervously, though there's a glint of steel in those wide grey eyes.

At nearly six foot, and in patent heels, she towers over me, let alone her husband, the low-slung Commons Speaker. "Someone said I wore flat shoes to make John look bigger. I'd never do that. He gets me in high heels or not at all."

But now it's time for her "skeletons", as she puts it. Deep breath.

"I was a big binge drinker in my twenties," says Bercow, who has just turned 40. "I started drinking at Oxford, being a party girl, and it got out of control.

"I got a grip for a while, but in the mid-Nineties I was working in advertising and I would drink wine at lunch then go out and drink a bottle in the evening: most evenings really. I had no stop button."

A bottle a day, while not exactly what the doctor ordered, was perhaps not that uncommon for a young career woman on the razzle in the Nineties.

"Well, OK. It was sometimes more like two bottles, except I promised John I wouldn't say that. Have I mucked it up already?"

Another Bercow bombshell follows. "I want to run for Parliament as a Labour candidate so this has all got to come out and I'd rather tell it myself."

What was she like at her worst? "I was an argumentative, stroppy drunk, picking arguments with my bosses over stupid things.

"Plus I'd lose my judgment and put myself in danger. I'd fall asleep on the Tube and end up in Epping or Heathrow. And I'd get into unlicensed minicabs in the early hours: all the things we'd tell our daughters not to do."

I ask about one-night stands. "Can we call them romantic liaisons?" she says then laughs. "Well, you're right, they weren't romantic. They were more like flings. I wasn't looking for love.

"But it's true that I would end up sometimes at a bar and someone would send a drink over, and I'd think, 'Why not?' and we'd go home together. I liked the excitement of not knowing how a night was going to end. It was all very ladette - work hard, play hard."

That's never as jolly as it sounds in the long run. "I would end up falling off the bar stool and I smoked like a trooper. The only good thing is that I never tried drugs: I knew I was the all-or-nothing kind and was afraid I'd like them too much."

A boyfriend warned her that she was behaving badly while drunk. "I said he was being sexist and misogynist. My response was to attack him rather than think about the truth."

She stopped drinking abruptly in October 2001, "because it wasn't fun any more. I went to AA for a couple of meetings. It was very helpful at first. But I thought I could give it up myself: and I did. Never touched a drop since".

Her background sounds conventionally posh: Marlborough College then Keble, Oxford, where she read theology, but on probing, it's more unsettled. Her elderly father ran a builder's merchants but died in her teens.

"I used the money he left me to send myself to Marlborough. I didn't really fit in with those girls in Alice bands and everyone coming from a house with a long drive."

Her Oxford ghosts returned to haunt her recently when it was alleged she lied on her CV about getting a theology degree when she had left Keble after two years without one.

She insists she never lied about her academic record or boasted of an "upper second", as some reports claimed, just a pass in her prelims.

Still, she didn't exactly go out of her way to be open, did she? "In hindsight, maybe I should have done it differently," she admits. "But I wanted a job and I didn't tell any lies."

Her husband is the textbook Tory Boy turned arch moderniser (so much so he annoys the Cameronians by being too pally with Labour). How on earth did he get together with a woman who makes Bridget Jones seem a paragon of restraint?

They met when she was 19 and had joined the Oxford University Conservative Association "for the social life".

After dating for six months, "he dumped me for being too argumentative," she says, adding sweetly: "But you have to remember that he was a Right-wing headbanger at the time. He's much more rounded and moderate now, and he's rethought a lot."

They stayed friends, even in her wild years. "He'd have a single pint and I'd guzzle wine but he was so fixated on politics, I don't think he noticed."

In 1997, she turned to Labour, under the spell of Tony Blair. Undeterred, Bercow, who'd just been selected for a safe Buckinghamshire seat, asked her to move in.

But she didn't fancy being the consort of a man wedded to the Commons: "He hardly ever left the office."

A few years later, he told her he'd met someone else: "And I thought, 'Oh, no, I really don't want this to happen', so I suggested we give it one more go and we were engaged shortly afterwards."

The couple have three children, aged five, four and one. Her eldest son is autistic and didn't speak till he was three-and-a-half.

Now she's trying to become a Labour councillor in a Pimlico ward that is solid Tory and has her eyes on a Parliamentary seat at the next election.

How's it all going to work? For the first time, she's a bit on edge. "John has to be above party politics as Speaker. Anyway, I've never been a constituency wife for John. He knew that when he married me."

As for the political divide, it runs right through the couple's (now very spacious) living room. "Oh, yes, we argue about a lot. He's still very Eurosceptic, I'm pro-European.

"I'm really keen on Harriet Harman and her equality agenda - she's done such a lot to advance the cause of women and I completely agree on her all-women shortlists: they transformed the Labour Party.

"I don't even want to send the children to the grammars in John's constituency. I'm strongly against selection, because it entrenches privilege."

No chance of David Cameron winning her over, then? "He's just a merchant of spin. I think he's really an archetypal Tory. He favours the interests of the few over the mainstream majority."

Heavens, she sounds like a Labour HQ handout. "Deep down, I do think the Tory party is for the privileged few and what it stands for isn't in the interests of most ordinary people."

In remarks that will grate with the Tory leadership, she says she doubts his commitment to the public services. "They're not really interested in opportunity for all. He has his children at state school now but let's see what happens at secondary level. There's not a real commitment to the state sector among the Tories. The vast majority of the shadow cabinet send their children privately."

Just in case we miss the point, she contrasts Gordon Brown's "peerless" handing of the economic crisis with Cameron's. "He would have walked away and let people sink or swim." Her chance to get on the candidates' list is looming in the next week.

Now, Sally, those expenses. Was it wise to start a refurb of the Speaker's apartments in the midst of an expenses furore in which her husband was embroiled? She says half the £45,000 spent was on routine maintenance such as safety and heating.

A lot went into "big iron planters on the terrace, to stop the children falling into the Thames", window locks and other precautions to make the august rooms suitable for under-fives.

The major spend on redecoratings arose because their autistic son was disturbed by the heavy red décor. "It really did bother him a lot, otherwise we would not have asked for the change."

I wonder, given her evident dislike of Conservatives, whether she tried to lure her husband to Labour. "I did lobby him to do that," she confesses. "But he's a Tory through and through."

One day, he might find himself calling his feisty wife to order in the Commons. "He'd be so tough on me though," she says. "I'd never get a question when he was in the chair: I'd have to wait till the deputy speaker was in."

There's a lot of the ingénue in Mrs Bercow - a sense that she's entitled to do what she wants and a vague amazement that others might disagree.

But she's got more spirit than most of the green benches of parliamentary women put together. Please, let Labour choose her.

The rest of us can just stand by and watch the fireworks over Westminster.

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