Unspeakably prolix and petty: will anyone want to read John Bercow’s autobiography?

John Bercow obviously intended his book to annoy people, and he’s certainly succeeded in that. MPs who don’t find their names in the index can generally count themselves lucky. He just loves pouring shit over other politicians, especially Tories. He finds David Cameron ‘an opportunist lightweight, sniffy, supercilious and deeply snobbish’; Theresa May ‘as wooden as your average coffee table’; Michael Gove ‘prone to oleaginous flattery’; Amber Rudd ‘all gong and no dinner’; Michael Howard ‘a decidedly cold fish’. But the one for whom he seems to feel the most durable animus is, rather oddly, William Hague — ‘robotic, cold and uninspiring’, ‘geeky, frankly a bit weird’ and guilty of a ‘rather shallow careerism’.

So which MPs does he like? Well, ‘as it happens, I like Boris Johnson. He can be charming and witty.’ And better still, Bercow beat him at tennis, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. He finds Jeremy Corbyn ‘decent to the core’ and has a huge admiration for Gordon Brown, who invited him and his family to stay at his Scottish home and cooked fish fingers for the children. He also admires Ken Clarke, and has a soft spot for Ann Widdecombe, while he is positively glowing about Jacob Rees-Mogg.

What does this very mixed bunch of likes and dislikes tell us? That he prefers rebels to conformists. That he hates snobs. That he has a particular aversion to people who are ‘cold’. He could never be accused of that — he is passionately emotional, sometimes almost laughably so. He describes himself as ‘rat-like and somewhat intense’, and admits that when he plays the tape of his first conference speech ‘I came across as a man possessed, swivel-eyed and somewhat alarming’. He says more than once (but then he says most things more than once) that he never had any hang-up about being short, but he was terribly bothered by acne as a teenager and was known as Crater Face at school.