Interview
Keeping order 12 April 2010 On keeping order during Parliament’s difficult times With the official dissolution of Parliament today, all current 646 MPs will be sent home, either to fight for re-election, lick their wounds, count their resettlement dosh or switch their so-called ‘taxi for hire’ lights on. However, there will be one small exception. The diminutive (5’7”, according to his last medical) Rt Hon John Bercow MP, will go back to his Buckingham seat ‘cautiously confident’ that he will return to Parliament after the General Election not only as MP for Bucks but also as the Speaker. As convention dictates that the main parties will stand aside in terms of electioneering in the seat of the sitting Speaker – although this one rather unusually has attracted the small threat from those who ignore the political etiquette like UKIP’s Nigel Farage – Bercow can, to all intents and purposes, go home, put his feet up and wait to be recalled. No matter who wins the election, the first business of the new Parliament will be to elect the Speaker. So in you olde ways of Westminster, a proposition will be put to the House that the immediate past Speaker (Bercow) takes the chair. So while Bercow must be the only MP in the UK secure in his immediate future, confidence in his own position, is not something Bercow has ever lacked. When he stood for election as Speaker last year following the controversial exit of Michael Martin, Bercow was roundly condemned by his fellow Conservative MPs as a Labour politician in disguise. His eventual election as the 157th Speaker, the first Jewish one and not, as he will tell you, the shortest – citing Speakers of yesteryear: Sir John Bussy, Sir John Wenlock and Sir Thomas Tresham who were all believed to be shorter – provoked unseemly scenes from the Tory benchers, with members sitting with their arms crossed and many refusing to applaud his appointment. There were some laughs as Bercow pledged “permanently to cast aside” his “previous political views” and the atmosphere on the opposition benches remained icy when the Prime Minister said: “Some of us thought you had done that some time ago.” The Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire Nadine Dorries said his election to the role was a ‘two-fingered salute’ from the Labour Party to the Conservatives in revenge for the manner of Michael Martin’s ousting; she has since said that he has made the role a ‘laughing stock’. But Bercow was undaunted by his fellow Conservatives’ fury then and dismisses any residual animosity as ‘water off a duck’s back’. He beat nine other candidates, including Labour’s Margaret Beckett and Tory veteran Ann Widdecombe. In the final round, he got 322 votes to fellow Tory Sir George Young’s 271.  After the result was announced, Mr Bercow was dragged to the chair, a tradition for the new Speaker, congratulated his nine rivals and told MPs it was the “greatest honour” of his political life. So why did he invoke so much ire among those of the same political hue? “I think a lot of members of my former party, the Conservative Party, tended to feel that the Speaker ought to be a somewhat older colleague who had served in the House for rather longer. A lot of them had a particular candidate in mind, a very good candidate who sought election and received a good deal of support. So that was one factor – they just felt instinctively and intrinsically that it was wrong to have a young member. Secondly, I think there were people who felt that I didn’t fit the bill because I wasn’t sufficiently a team player; that I had worked with other political parties.” And he says that is what is at the crux of the issue; politics and politicians are very unforgiving of change. “The other day I went to the launch of an independent school magazine and I spoke and then asked if the young people had any questions and this young man said, ‘as someone who started in the Monday Club and ended up being elected Speaker, mainly by Labour MPs, what are we to make of John Bercow?’. I said to the audience that I was grateful for the question but one of the difficulties in politics is getting permission to change. I did say to the young man that I joined the Monday Club in 1981 when I was 18 and I ceased to be involved in 1983 and formally resigned in 1984, which was 26 years ago. I added that while I didn’t know about him but I do believe in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and that Denis Healey was a Communist in his [early] years and Cecil Parkinson chaired the Labour Club at Cambridge. We all change and that is only right and proper over a period of years.” Unquestionably, many Tories detest the fact that Bercow is a political chameleon. He has gone from being a far right member of the Monday Club to being seen as a trendy liberal – he has even advised the Labour Government – and now as Speaker, is apparently able to cast off his political colours and act as an impartial arbiter. He is, they scoff, even married to a prospective Labour politician. How can this be so? And how can a man who is guilty as charged of being one of the “flippers” of the expenses scandal and had to pay back £6,508 in capital gains, really stand for reform of the House? “There is a limit to the number of times you can say sorry and how much good it does. I have issued a number of apologies on behalf of the House over the last nine months. For my own part, I can only say that I have always behaved honestly and I have never claimed anything that I didn’t think I was entitled [to]. These were the allowances and I claimed the allowances and I did claim the housing allowance, I am not a man of means, and I believed I claimed honestly but I can absolutely see why the public thought this was an extraordinarily generous system and questioned why MPs could bank the profit when they sell these homes paid for by the taxpayer. “I think we do become institutionalised and we did over the expenses issue and very few of us asked ourselves the question, ‘how would this look on the front page of a newspaper?’ I myself concede that I made mistakes. Several years ago I sold a property and my accountant told me that I was under no obligation to pay capital gains tax, asked me if the house was in regular use and I said, ‘God, I am there half the week’, and he didn’t believe that I would need to pay capital gains tax on this and all these years later, I didn’t give it a second thought, and when the Telegraph asked me if I had paid tax on the property when I sold that property in Buckinghamshire, I honestly couldn’t remember. I went and checked and it turned out I hadn’t and I found out what the tax would have been and I paid it. “I understand the public’s anger but it seems to me as Speaker that all I can do now is try to take the system forward by insisting on increased disclosure with release of receipts, etc and by supporting Sir Thomas Legg’s review of past claims and saying to colleagues, of whom past repayments were demanded, ‘cough up and don’t whinge’ and I am pleased to say, Mandy, that as a result of Tom Legg’s review and the appeals process, every MP from whom a repayment was demanded has either made that repayment or will have done so by the end of July.” The events of the last 12 months and the drip, drip of the expenses revelations have untangled a web of avarice, corruption and downright cheating at the heart of our political system. Bercow won the Speaker’s chair on a ticket of wholesale reform. How did he feel during the height of the scandal? “It was a shattering experience for all of us engaged in the profession of politics because reputational carnage was inflicted on the House and greater damage was done to the House than at any other time. The only damage that I can think of that was greater was the physical damage inflicted by the Nazis. It was a terrible period and all of us bear responsibility for persisting lazily, unjustifiably, with an allowances system which could not be defended. It was overly generous, it was notably secretive, it was not tied to any concept of accountability and although it was very upsetting for Members of Parliament at the time when the Telegraph launched its series of disclosures, the truth is that what the Telegraph did was a mercy killing because we couldn’t go on with that arrangement.” But if they all knew it was wrong why was it allowed to persist? Where was the honour in honourable? “I think the truth is that the allowances system was either designed to be or came to be seen to be a substitute for salary. This isn’t a view that everyone accepts and I have heard some senior members say they don’t see it like that at all. David Winnock (Labour MP for Walsall North) says that, for example, but I think David is wrong. I have lost count of the number of senior members from both sides of the house who have said this dates back 30 years. In some people’s minds, it dates to when Thatcher was Prime Minister and I have even heard it date back to when Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and a man called Bob Mellish was the government chief whip. At the time there was a salary review and it looked at MPs’ salaries and recommended an increase and Callaghan said he could not agree to this while he was operating a pay policy in the public sector, at which point, Bob Mellish came along and said, ‘calm down, boys, calm down, we can do it in another way’ and he pretty well said to MPs there is the money, go spend it. It was unjustified and we were wrong to carry on with it and we completely failed to see when we passed the FOI Act that it would logically and equitably apply to the House as well and the whole thing crept up on members and we did not apply the same forethought and consideration to the issue that we should have applied. Do I accept some responsibility for that? I do, along with every member of the Parliament, from the highest in the land to the most recent entrant.” Personal misdemeanours aside, Bercow has been a staunch supporter of an overhaul of the discredited expenses system and embraced the blueprint produced in record-breaking time by Sir Christopher Kelly including the creation of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) whose chair, Sir Ian Kennedy said that the publication of the new rules for MPs’ expenses would provide “a clean break from the past”. On the day that Bercow and I meet in the grandeur of his Westminster grace-and-favour apartments – the same apartments that he famously redecorated at a cost of £45,000 shortly after moving his wife and three children in – the new rules are published and are undoubtedly a huge improvement on the previous. In some areas, the IPSA recommendations far outweigh those originally mooted by Sir Christopher Kelly but on one significant issue the new rules are weaker: they allow MPs to employ members of their own family. However, it was abuse of this particular facet of parliamentary life that created such a public storm when it was revealed that the long-standing MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, had claimed more than a quarter of a million pounds over six years in employing members of his own family. “I shouldn’t beat about the bush, I favoured a ban on the employment of spouses and my reasoning was that the collateral damage that the House had suffered was that we need to make a decisive and radical break with the past. It wasn’t in any sense that I felt, for the most part, that spouses weren’t working very hard for their partners, in some cases way beyond the call of duty and very efficiently and providing very good value for money, but it was simply that there was a perception, as a result of the Conway case, that there was something rotten in the State of Denmark which led me to conclude that it would be a good idea to have a complete ban. So having said all of that very publicly, it would be absurd for me to suddenly change my mind and row back and say that I have somehow changed my mind, I haven’t and still think a ban would have been better.  “But I would like to make two points if I may: first the whole point about independence is that those that enjoy it have a right to exercise it and IPSA is the independent body and you cannot credibly say that there should be an independently determined system and then object when that independence is exercised and IPSA has come to a different view. I respect IPSA’s right to do so although I maintain my own view on that matter. Secondly, I think we should look at the package as a whole and as a package, it is a radical break from the past and an improvement on the discredited system of previous years so overall, I feel very upbeat about it and it seems to me there are major changes; state-financed house purchase is out of the window, there will be very tough restrictions on what MPS can claim, there will be a requirement that if people are going to have to claim an expense then they will have to prove what they have spent and therefore, they will have to provide receipts as a matter of course and these are major improvements.” Will this bring the matter to a close? “I think that a number of things will bring closure of the expenses/sleaze issue; the very fact that there is to be a General Election with the voters given the chance to cast their verdict will be very important and indeed cathartic and secondly, I think we need a period when the new system is up and running and it can be seen that it is more equitable, fairer, more transparent, more accountable and once that has run for a period of time, certainly once it has been running for a whole Parliament of an average of four or five years, I hope that would bring closure and thirdly, I think the House has to try and anticipate and address other potential sources of scandal and criticism, in other words, instead of always being on the back foot, we have to have a root and branch look at other things which could be problematic. For example, the financing of all party groups is an issue. I used to chair an all-party group on speech and language difficulties, the secretariat of which was provided by the Royal College of Speech and Language therapists which I would argue was an entirely respectable arrangement because it is not a profit-making body although it is a professional body. However, an all-party group which is run with the secretariat provided by a profit-making organisation needs to have a clear set of rules and I wouldn’t think it was appropriate for instance, if an all-party beer group was financed by a brewer. “As far as lobbying is concerned, the House will have to take a view about this but I think there are a couple of things that are very important … and that is that we are operating a much more transparent regime in terms of what colleagues do outside the house, what they are paid and exactly what sort of work they are doing to earn that payment and that seems to me to be a good thing. If there are to be outside interests, the members must declare in very specific terms what they are so the media and the public can see what their local MP is doing outside and be clear that it is above board. My own sense is that there is a great deal of public unhappiness and while it is not for me to impose a rule, I would say two things; if there is to be a continuation and extension of the lobbying industry, which I think is absolutely predictable and not illegitimate, then there has to be a very clear set of rules and if you are asking me whether there should be statutory register of lobbyists then I do and think there is a good argument for it. Ministers have pointed out that there is a much greater culture now of disclosing all meetings that have taken place so there is no hole and corner activity and I am all for that but it seems to me that there is a lot to be said for having a sort of codification of the rules in relation to lobbying. “There is also an issue over the provision of passes to ex-Members of Parliament and I think we have to be very clear that we know to whom we are giving passes and for what purpose they are being used. “We have already talked about a possible statutory register of lobbyists, restrictions and clear guidance on the basis of the issue of passes to ex-members and thirdly, you say that even with greater transparency, are the public happy and I haven’t done an opinion poll but I suspect they are probably not. My own personal view, and it is not for me to impose this on the House, is that a Member of Parliament should do a full-time job for a full-time salary. Of course the counter to that is the view that we will end up with a House full of professional politicians who have done nothing else and my counter to that is if members feel they need to stay in touch with the outside world, be it through commercial, business or the charitable sector or whatever, then it is perfectly possible to do that by doing some kind of business and parliament trust or a spell with the armed forces or whatever. If we are committed to strengthening Parliament then we are going to get better at the business of scrutiny and holding government to account then the role of an MP should be strengthened and more demanding and more fulfilling and if that be so then it should surely be a full-time role. “And before, Mandy, you say does that mean I am calling for an increase in salary for MPs, I am not but I am saying that I think pay should be determined independently of the House, preferably by the IPSA against a list of comparators and should be determined each year without the ability of Parliament to interfere. I think independent pay and the end of outside interests would be a good thing but that is just my view and I do not wish to impose my view on the House.” Bercow repeats that phrase quite a lot – that he wouldn’t wish to impose his views on the House – but I wonder how true that is. He tells me a story about being mistakenly sent some email correspondence between various council officials on a matter he had been trying to resolve for a constituent. It concluded, ‘we have taken too long on this, Bercow is hustling and is annoyed, can we not just sign this off otherwise he won’t shut up about it?’ The plea speaks volumes. Bercow may enjoy the sound of his own voice but he is also rather good at it. it. He speaks in an almost old-fashioned manner, with courteous requests such as, ‘if I may’ or ‘if I could be so bold’, sprinkled throughout a lengthy diatribe which gives you the false impression that you are actually participating in his monologue. He splits infinitives, taking lengthy pauses in the middle of words, giving the impression of great thought and precision. Testament to his verbal jousting skills have been the plaudits showered upon him during his parliamentary career including the award of Backbencher to Watch in 1998, the Channel Four/Hansard Society Political Award for Opposition MP of the Year in 2005 and in the same year he was voted the Backbencher of the Year in The House Magazine awards. He was also named Health/International Champion of the Year at the Charity Champion Awards 2007. Bercow did once make a living from teaching others how to speak in public and is now putting it to great use. Ironically, his first address to the House as Speaker was to warn others about giving long-winded questions and answers. He has been MP for Buckingham since 1997, but before that he was also in politics, as both a councillor and adviser. Margaret Thatcher was his local MP and he got a first in government from the University of Essex. He regrets not having become a barrister but one suspects that politics is the true home for his love of verbosity. He has been described as pompous; he would prefer to see himself as a plain speaker. Strangely, he stood for Parliament initially in Motherwell in 1987. He arrived in Scotland, having never been to Motherwell and was, he says, ‘comprehensively slaughtered’. “Dr Jeremy Bray was re-elected and was most courteous but his wife was a bit irritated because with all the zeal and ebullience of youth, I acknowledged his victory from the platform and how well the Labour Party had done in Scotland but I couldn’t resist making the point that the election as a whole was determined across the country and Mrs Thatcher had won a third term and it was a dramatically successful night for the Conservative Party. “Mrs Bray was quoted in the local paper the next week saying, ‘Mr Bercow’s speech from the platform was most inappropriate. My husband had just comprehensively beaten him and he should have said very little.” This seems an appropriate point to ask him about a publication apparently penned by him about how to understand women, which offers instruction on how to seduce drunken women. He shows a spark of annoyance. “There are things about me that are true, for instance, that I was a member of the Monday Club in 1981 and I have never denied that but I didn’t write that guide and I get slightly irritated when people say I did because I know I didn’t. “I am many things but I have never written or spoken abusively about women. I am not a sexist and if I was, my wife would not be married to me. I do understand women but I did not write that book.” His wife Sally, who has been selected as a candidate for the Labour Party, would likely concur. She has been vilified in the media for revelations about her past excessive drinking and sexual behaviour. Strangely, these admissions have been used as a stick to beat the Speaker with too but he is admirable in his wife’s defence and reveals an unexpected side – a modern man, with modern attitudes and the ability to be a staunch defender of the unconventional. “We are a modern couple and my wife is not an appendage of me. There has been lots of hostility from the hard-right commentators and there are certain people on the tabloids that are just nasty, not very good, can’t write very well, don’t have much of interest to say and make a living by being abusive. They have done it to me and try to do it to Sally but they are not going to get the better of us and we will live our lives the way we choose and think fit. I respect the right of my wife to hold the views of her choice. There is an unstated assumption that she should walk three paces behind me, wear a hair band and content herself slicing mushrooms and I don’t see why she should.” It is his slightly comical unconventionality, coupled with his terrier-like defence of what he deems right and wrong that bodes well for the new Westminster incumbents who may not always wish to toe the party line. Related articles: Moore of the same 5 September 2010 Taking power 5 September 2010 What Labour did next 25 June 2010 A liberal view of life 11 June 2010 The Alexander Technique 28 May 2010 See all articles in this category Submit a comment |
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