After a year out of the headlines, John Bercow is back. The former Commons Speaker appeared on the Observer front page in June to announce his membership of the Labour party, eighteen months after retiring from Parliament.
The onetime Tory right winger is still smarting over the government’s refusal to award him a peerage and thus a seat for life in the Lords to happily chunter away. There is now speculation as to whether Bercow’s revised goal is a return to the Commons under Labour colours – as if his former colleagues there had not suffered enough.
One story Bercow will have been less pleased about was the news last month that he has broken his promise not to claim his gold-plated Speaker’s pension until he is 65. The former Buckingham MP, who is still only 58, promised in 2012 to save the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds by not receiving the benefit until 2028. Yet he has in fact been taking the final salary pension – worth over £35,000 a year – since he retired as Speaker aged 56 in November 2019.
A ‘Speaker’s Pension’ statement at the time acknowledged that as Bercow was just 46 when he became Speaker and had originally intended to serve no more than nine years, he would still be in his mid-50s when he stood down, be able to earn a new income and ‘also be in receipt of the Speaker pension at a relatively young age’.
Now though, out of office, the famously flexible constitutionalist has (shockingly) changed his mind – despite abolishing the perk for successor Lindsay Hoyle and others in 2013. Given Bercow’s return to straightforward party politics, Steerpike thought it worth looking at how much the ex-Speaker has claimed in the interests of transparency.
Leaving aside his 12 years as Conservative MP for Buckingham until 2009, Bercow collected two salaries over the following decade: one as an MP, for which he received £771,000, and one as the Speaker, for which he got £824,00. His much scrutinised pension pots adds another £952,000 which now pays him a cool £35,000-£40,000 a year. Treasury documents show he received a £19,221 ‘severance payment’ in 2019 on top too, giving him a total cost sum of £2.56 million.
Given his professions of public service, Bercow will likely say such money was well spent. But for the discerning shopper, what else could that sum buy you? In football terms, it would be enough to pay the wages of Argentinian striker Lionel Messi at PSG for 18 days, or the annual starting salary of 103 nurses in the NHS. Alternatively you could pay for 31,000 of John Bercow’s recorded Cameo messages at £82.50 a pop to get the authentic Remainer Parliament experience.
It’s worth noting of course this sum does not include other Bercow-related costs such as the £931,000 he claimed for his parliamentary office during this period. The former MP had a penchant for high expense claims too such as billing £96,000 on travel and accommodation in three years or £367 for going to Luton to talk about how the expenses scandal had damaged the reputation of MPs. An analysis in 2019 revealed he’d claimed £250,000 in globe-trotting including a £173,000 flight bill.
Costs for the Speaker’s Office ran into six figures each year too, coming to £504,737 in 2014-15. While administration and entertainment are expected functions of the office, eyebrows were raised by orders for 350 photographs of Bercow, beeswax candles and tuning a grand piano in his official home.
And then of course there’s the matter of how much the ex-Speaker received in complimentary tickets, with the Times calculating the tennis-mad fan received £47,000 worth of freebies courtesy of the All England Lawn Tennis Club (£23,000), ATP (£8,000) and the National Tennis Centre (£7,510). He also received royal box seats at Wimbledon on no less than six occasions.
A fitting representative for the party of the workers, eh comrades?
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