Slippery Jack

A mad, muscular Sally Bercow cavorts on the Commons chair, diminutive husband on her knee, his features impish. With a few scratches of the nib, the Independent’s merciless Dan Brown, in his cover design for this biography, passes judgment more viciously than Bobby Friedman manages over the next 250 often unexciting pages. The book is not entirely without merit. It is earnest in the manner of a schoolgirl’s essay. There are not too many spelling mistakes. The author has plainly made scores of telephone calls to old acquaintances of the man we must now, revoltingly, call Mr Speaker. Friedman deserves a B-plus for effort.

His book is not, however, as vivid as it should have been, given the preening, sycophantic, short-tempered grotesque it has for a subject. One also hoped for more humour. Bercow is a figure ripe for mockery, as Brown’s cartoon shows.

It begins with some only mildly interesting stuff about John Bercow’s Romanian grandfather, a Jewish furrier who fled to the East End of London. Friedman points out that Bercow has used his ancestry to personal advantage at times, telling the Board of Deputies of British Jews in 2010 that his father taught him to be proud of his Jewish heritage and to ‘stand up for what I am … and not to seek to hide it’. At other times, however, the same John Bercow has been distinctly reticent on the subject. Is that because Britain has been anti-Jewish and Bercow was legitimately worried? Or is it because this man has long been as slippery as an avocado stone?

Bercow’s drift from Monday Club right to Harmanesque left — a voyage which won him enough Labour votes to seize the Speakership in 2009 — is well known.