Three months ago, he was the most powerful man in Britain. Today, he is reduced to bellowing his catchphrase ‘ORRRRDERR’ on Italian chat shows.
Can there be any more delicious consequence of Boris Johnson’s general election victory than the consignment to total irrelevance of that noisome dwarf creature John Bercow, formerly the Speaker of the House of Commons, now merely a very expensive [*] prat-for-hire?
[*] Bercow was reportedly paid £60,000 as the expert commentator for the communist channel Sky News on election night. His pearls of wisdom dropped into the ears of a total audience of around 46,000. “His huge payment is the talk of Sky News. Nobody could believe it”, one insider was quoted as saying.
Watching Bercow on the Italian chat show, barking like a performing seal with a ball on its nose, it seems scarcely credible that this man was once bigger than the Prime Minister. (Metaphorically, that is: not in terms of actual height).
He shouldn’t have been: running the country, tearing up the constitution and riding roughshod over parliamentary democracy were never, ever in the job description of Speaker of the House. But that’s how, for years, Bercow interpreted his role: the spear-carrier who insisted on playing the lead. And amazingly, he got away with it.
Of all the various chancers, malcontents, no-hopers, Establishment slimes, wreckers and weapons-grade onanists who made it their mission to sabotage Brexit, no one got closer to achieving it than this petulant nobody with delusions of adequacy, Bercow.
Future historians may find it extraordinary that Britain’s Opposition front benches in the early 21st century could be dominated by anti-Semitic, terrorist-supporting, unpatriotic, thug-backed Marxists. But what they’ll surely find even more astounding is that the Speaker was able to abuse his office to ensure that it was this vile rabble of an Opposition, not the elected Conservative government, which was able to dominate the Commons agenda. And allowed to come within a whisker of sabotaging the Brexit vote altogether.
There’s a noble tradition that we should all be magnanimous in victory.
But I really don’t see how or why this should apply to Bercow — or indeed to any of the confederacy of losers that we’ve finally, finally, managed to oust from their positions in public life.
As I complained to my friend Toby Young on our post-election London Calling podcast, it doesn’t feel like revenge enough, merely watching these jumped up nonentities who have frustrated and irritated us for so long – Dominic Grieve; Anna Soubry; Sarah Wollaston; Sam Gymiah; ‘Sir’ Oliver Wetwin; Jeremy Corbyn; John McDonnell; the annoying EU pillock with the top hat and the megaphone; etc etc – slope off into the sunset.
I wouldn’t go so far as arguing that they should be dragged through the capital in chains and taken to the city dungeons to be ritually strangled: that’s the sort of thing someone from Momentum — or the increasingly bloodthirsty and eco-fascistic Greta Thunberg — might propose.
But I do feel very strongly that people who have acted in such bad faith — Bercow especially: who horribly and deliberately and cynically and vauntingly abused a constitutional system dependent entirely on the notion that officeholders would behave in good faith — ought to be made to perform some form of public penance for their appalling behaviour.
A Walk of Shame – like the one performed by Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones – would seem to me quite appropriate, followed by a lifelong period of social ostracism in which we never, ever again have to see any of their faces in public.
This isn’t so much about revenge as about deterrence.
One of the reasons politics is so corrupt and rotten — and the same applies of course to the rest of the public sector — is that the penalties for failure (or worse) are next to non-existent.
Preening gimps like Bercow can bring their country to its knees and what’s the worst thing that can happen to them? A few sneering tweets and the odd angry column like this one. They get to keep their million-pound-plus ring-fenced pensions and their celebrity book deals, though, don’t they?
Or look at Jo Swinson. In return for her brief period leading the Liberal Democrats over a well-deserved cliff, it now seems highly possible that she will join the dozens of other Liberal Democrats now swelling the House of Lords.
How can this possibly be right or fair?
Swinson’s failing party – as the general election result just demonstrated – has nothing whatsoever to say to the electorate. No one, barring a few tofu-eating freaks, found anything to recommend in Swinson’s championing of bizarro, SJW causes like transgenderism. Yet soon this losing loser could be Baroness Swinson, sitting in the House of Lords, and scrutinising government policy from a bleeding heart perspective which hardly any of the public she is supposed to serve and represent actually shares.
If Swinson does go to the House of Lords; if the grotesque, pantomime villain Bercow keeps popping up on our screens in the guise of a lovable figure of yesteryear of whom we can all now be fond; if Sir Oliver Letwin doesn’t get cut dead or blackballed every time he attempts to enter a gentleman’s club, we shall know the system has failed and that the awful history we have just happily escaped may well yet repeat itself.
These people- – and I’m sure there are many names I’ve forgotten that you will remind me of in the comments below — are a national disgrace and they should be anathematised, expunged, airbrushed from history.