No Way Out by Tim Shipman

Author:Tim Shipman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinPublishers
Published: 2024-03-15T11:47:53+00:00

The first, six years earlier, put Bercow at odds with precedent and with the speaker’s clerks, to the great delight of the Paleosceptics. He allowed an amendment to the Queen’s speech from Brexiteer John Baron, expressing regret that the government had not included a referendum on EU membership. More than 100 Conservatives rebelled, convincing David Cameron that he would have to call a referendum.

Bercow’s action was inadvertently one of the handmaidens of Brexit, an outcome he deplored. The speaker believed the decision to call the vote to be a ‘major failure of statecraft’ by Cameron.9 Bercow’s ‘personal view’ was that Brexit was ‘a great mistake’.10 He saw the campaign and its supporters as ‘racist’.11 Bercow found the May government’s vague definition of Brexit ‘utterly pathetic’.12 When the prime minister lost her majority, in June 2017, the speaker thought it ‘mind-boggling’ she did not change her approach, describing the PM as ‘quite extraordinarily politically unimaginative’.13 MPs did not have to wait until after he had retired to learn Bercow’s views. Speaking to students at the University of Reading just months after the referendum, he admitted, ‘Personally, I voted to Remain.’ A family car, parked in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, was conspicuously adorned with a sticker emblazoned with ‘Bollocks to Brexit’, his wife Sally’s vehicle, the speaker insisted.

Some former colleagues saw Bercow’s marriage as the key to his political journey from the pro-apartheid Tory Monday club to a socially liberal moderniser. ‘The problem with John is that he discovered sexual intercourse and the Labour Party at the same time,’ one remarked. Bercow was a loner, a nuisance to his own side even as a frontbencher. Having failed to crack Tory politics, he set his eyes on the speakership and openly courted Labour MPs. The son of a Jewish taxi driver, he faced unpleasant abuse about his origins, his race and his height. These attributes attracted Westminster’s cod psychologists who saw a short man with a plate of triple-cooked chips on his shoulder, a grievance against his own party and a determination to make his mark.

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