An Outspoken Speaker, Seeking to Quell the Unruly
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON IT is easy to spot John Bercow at the weekly ritual known as Prime Minister’s Questions, when Britain’s top lawmakers shout and jeer at one another like the ill-behaved schoolboys many once were. Mr. Bercow is the one trying to get them to shut up. “Order, order!” Mr. Bercow, the House of Commons speaker, yells repeatedly, so as to be heard above the din. Sometimes, he singles out particular miscreants. “Try to calm down and behave like an adult,” Mr. Bercow might bellow, as he once did at Tim Loughton, then the minister for children. “Do not shake your head at me!” he admonished Graham Stuart, a Conservative member of Parliament. “You are a distinguished practicing barrister,” he said to Michael Ellis, a lawyer turned legislator. “You wouldn’t have behaved like that in the courts. Don’t behave like that in this chamber!” Sometimes, they listen; other times, they do not. Speakers, who preside over debates and serve as the highest authority in the Commons, have been trying to control their unruly colleagues for as long as they have had unruly colleagues to control. (The office dates to 1377; Mr. Bercow is the 157th person to hold it.) But he is a zealot on a mission. He wants Britain’s legislators to behave like plausible grown-ups, not overexcited adolescents who have spent too much time reading “Lord of the Flies” and throwing stuff at one another in the cafeteria. He wants them to pipe down. “When the decibel level exceeds anything that Deep Purple would have even dreamed of in their heyday in the 1970s as the loudest band in the world, that is a negative,” Mr. Bercow, 50, said recently in an interview in his elegant offices in Parliament. He lives in an apartment upstairs, with his three children and his wife, Sally, an outspoken Labour supporter who once appeared on “Celebrity Big Brother” and whose provocative views tend to complicate Mr. Bercow’s life. (“My argument is that she is not an appendage of her husband,” he said. “She’s my wife, but she’s not my chattel.”) They have a cat named Order, which presumably gives him a chance to practice his shouting techniques. MR. BERCOW was elected speaker in 2009 after lobbying hard for the job. A Conservative, he had alienated some colleagues by shifting to the Tory’s left wing from its right wing. (He resigned from the party, as is customary, when he became speaker.) At the same time, many Labour members supported him because they suspected that having him as speaker would annoy the Tories. (They were right.) As an aide tried fruitlessly to limit the interview to an hour, Mr. Bercow explained his motivations in running for the office when Parliament was still in disgrace after the revelation that many members had used their expense accounts to pay for things like new stoves and, in one case, moat cleaning. In addition to the noise issue, “it was a combination of speedier progress, greater democratic legitimacy and enhanced scrutiny that I was seeking by way of reform,” Mr. Bercow said. “And I can fairly say the thrust of these reforms have taken root, to the advantage of the House,” he added. Mr. Bercow speaks in a hyperarticulate, perfectly punctuated style, as if he were a statesman giving a major policy address. He is fond of a conversational device in which he poses and then answers his own questions. During the interview, he accurately used the word “desuetude” in a sentence. (“It’s as if he goes to bed every night, reads a thesaurus, inwardly digests it and then spews it out the next day,” a fellow legislator said.) Before he became speaker, Mr. Bercow was already known for bringing a pedantic streak to Parliamentary debates. Once he schooled a colleague on the difference between “less” and “fewer.” Another time, he interrupted a government minister to say, “Do not split infinitives.” (“The honorable gentleman must be careful,” the unamused minister replied, “otherwise someone will split his infinitives for him.”) Many members of Parliament hate being lectured or reined in, and Mr. Bercow is not universally popular. Some Conservatives actively loathe him. In describing him, his detractors tend to use words like “cocky,” “pompous” and “ambitious” — the last often code for “Jewish” in an establishment with an undercurrent of anti-Semitic snobbery. The reason for this, many say, is that Mr. Bercow is an outsider in a cliquey institution controlled mostly by small-c conservatives and smooth old Etonians. “You got red-faced, roast beef, true-grit Tories who can’t stand the fact that this little outsider is there in charge,” said a former member of Parliament, alluding to Mr. Bercow’s height (5-foot-6 ½) and non-Etonian background, and speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be associated with mean remarks. The son of a Jewish used-car salesman who fell on hard times and then drove a gypsy cab, Mr. Bercow grew up in North London, went to a local state school and the University of Essex and pulled himself up by the bootstraps that can be so hard to acquire in Britain. Disciplined, determined, dedicated, bristling with intelligence, he threw himself into Tory politics, entered Parliament in 1997 and, somewhere along the way, upgraded his accent. (He used to run public-speaking courses.) In a place like the House of Commons, there is nothing like the potential loneliness of the self-invented man in a position of power. “Some people are very, very rude to him,” one legislator said. His critics say he is rude back, almost delightedly so. “If someone is being very cheeky, it can be quite fun to deal with that situation,” Mr. Bercow said. “But if you ask me, do I want to be speaker for the kick of putting people down? No. I think that would be a very sad, rather pathetic reason for wanting to be speaker. I want to be speaker because I’ve always believed passionately in Parliament.” CONSERVATIVES feel that Mr. Bercow is harder on them than he is on the opposition, and he has been known to instruct Prime Minister David Cameron in midflow on the finer points of parliamentary procedure. But some of his loudest critics have come around, including Mark Pritchard, a Tory from The Wrekin, who, during an unpleasant encounter with the speaker in a hallway in 2011, cursed and observed forcefully that Mr. Bercow was not, in fact, “royalty.” The two later made up, and Mr. Pritchard is now a proud convert to Team Bercow. “The speaker has helped make the House of Commons relevant again,” he said in an admiring e-mail. “He makes a point of giving backbenchers a voice, which is good for Parliament and good for democracy, and most fair-minded people respect him for that.” Not Simon Burns, the transportation minister, who once called Mr. Bercow a “stupid, sanctimonious little dwarf” right on the Commons floor. After an interest group representing dwarfs complained, Mr. Burns apologized to “any group of people” he might have offended. But he refused to apologize to Mr. Bercow. “With hindsight, the ‘little’ was superfluous,” Mr. Burns said in a telephone interview. Mr. Bercow has moved on. “I don’t want to crawl over the entrails of past disputes,” he said. He has other things on this mind. Recently, he recalled, he and his wife were discussing disorderliness in the Commons when their 7-year-old son, Freddie, interrupted. “He turned to me and said, ‘Daddy, most people in Parliament are quite rude, but you’re not rude — you’re trying to stop other people being rude,’ ” Mr. Bercow related. “I said, ‘Freddie, that summarizes the position perfectly.’” |