John Bercow
John Simon Bercow is a British former politician who served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 2009 to 2019, and the Member of Parliament for Buckingham between 1997 and 2019. A member of the Conservative Party prior to becoming speaker, he was the first MP since Selwyn Lloyd in 1971 to be elected speaker without having been a deputy speaker. After resigning as speaker in 2019 and opting not to seek re-election as an MP in the 2019 general election, Bercow left Parliament. In 2021, he joined the Labour Party but was suspended in 2022.
Bercow was a councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth from 1986 to 1990 and unsuccessfully contested parliamentary seats in the 1987 and 1992 general elections, before being elected for Buckingham in 1997. Promoted to the Shadow cabinet in 2001, he held posts under Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. In November 2002, Bercow resigned over a dispute concerning his support for the Adoption and Children Act 2002, but returned a year later, only to be dismissed from the Shadow cabinet in 2004. Having initially been strongly associated with the right-wing faction of his party, his views shifted; by 2007, there were rumours that he would defect to the Labour Party.
On the resignation of Michael Martin in June 2009, Bercow stood successfully in the election to replace him as speaker. As speaker, he was obliged to leave the Conservative Party and remain as an independent for the duration of his tenure. He was re-elected unopposed at the commencements of the Parliaments in 2010, 2015 and 2017. This made him the first speaker since the Second World War to have been elected four times, as well as the first since then to have served alongside four prime ministers. In September 2019, Bercow declared that he would stand down as Commons speaker and MP on 31 October; he remained speaker until being appointed to the Manor of Northstead on 4 November 2019.
In 2014, Bercow was appointed Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire. In July 2017, he was appointed Chancellor of the University of Essex, stepping down from this role in November 2021. In January 2020, he became part-time professor of politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was suspended from the Labour Party in 2022 after 21 complaints of him bullying staff were upheld. Since the death of Betty Boothroyd in 2023, he is the only living former Speaker of the House of Commons.
Early life and education
On 19 January 1963, John Bercow was born in Edgware, Middlesex, the son of Brenda and Charles Bercow, a taxi driver. His father was born to a Jewish family and his mother converted to Judaism. His paternal grandparents were Jews who arrived in Britain from Romania in the early 20th century. Having settled in the UK, the family anglicised its surname from Berkowitz to Bercow. Bercow attended Frith Manor Primary School in Woodside Park, and Finchley Manorhill School, a large comprehensive school in North Finchley. In his youth, Bercow was a successful junior tennis player, but was too short to turn professional. In 1975 he appeared on the UK children's television series Crackerjack!.Bercow graduated with a first-class honours degree in government from the University of Essex in 1985. Anthony King, a professor at the university, has said about Bercow that "When he was a student here, he was very right-wing, pretty stroppy, and very good. He was an outstanding student." As a young activist, Bercow was a member of the right-wing Conservative Monday Club. He stood as a candidate for the club's national executive in 1981 with a manifesto calling for a programme of "assisted repatriation" of immigrants, and became secretary of its immigration and repatriation committee. At the age of 20 he left the club, citing the views of many of the club's members as his reason, and has since then called his participation in the club "utter madness" and dismissed his views from that period as "bone headed".
After graduating from the University of Essex, Bercow was elected as the last national chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students, 1986–87. The FCS was then broken up by the chairman of the Conservative Party, Norman Tebbit, after one of its members had accused previous Tory PM Harold Macmillan of war crimes in extraditing Cossacks to the Soviet Union. Bercow attracted the attention of the Conservative leadership, and in 1987 he was appointed by Tebbit as vice-chairman of the Conservative Collegiate Forum to head the campaign for student support in the run-up to the 1987 general election.
After a spell in merchant banking, Bercow joined the lobbying firm Rowland Sallingbury Casey in 1988, becoming a board director within five years. With fellow Conservative Julian Lewis, Bercow ran an advanced speaking and campaigning course for over 10 years, which trained over 600 Conservatives in campaigning and communication techniques. He has also lectured in the United States to students of the Leadership Institute.
Political career
Councillor
In 1986, Bercow was elected as a Conservative councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth and served for four years representing the Streatham, St Leonard's ward. In 1987, he was appointed the youngest deputy group leader in the United Kingdom.Special adviser
In 1995, Bercow was appointed as a special adviser to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Jonathan Aitken. Following Aitken's resignation to fight a libel action, Bercow served as a special adviser to the Secretary of State for National Heritage, Virginia Bottomley.Parliamentary career
Bercow was an unsuccessful Conservative candidate in the 1987 general election in Motherwell South, and again at the 1992 general election in Bristol South. In 1996 he paid £1,000 to charter a helicopter so that he could attend the selection meetings for two safe Conservative parliamentary seats on the same day – Buckingham and Surrey Heath – and was selected as the candidate for Buckingham. He has referred to the hiring of the helicopter as "the best £1,000 I have ever spent".Bercow was first elected to parliament in the 1997 general election as the MP for Buckingham with a majority of 12,386. He then increased his majority at the 2001 general election being elected by a margin of 13,325 votes. He was re-elected at the 2005 general election with an again increased majority of 18,129.
Bercow devoted a notable portion of his maiden speech to praising former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher whom he called "the world's greatest living statesman." In 1999, the Almanac of British Politics described him as an "articulate, abrasive and waspish Commons performer" who Tony Blair had labelled as "nasty and ineffectual in equal quantity" for an attack he had made on Robin Cook.
Bercow rose quickly through the opposition's junior offices. He was appointed a frontbench spokesman for Education and Employment in June 1999, and then a frontbench spokesman for Home Affairs in July 2000, before being brought into the shadow cabinet in 2001 by the Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. He served as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury from September 2001 to July 2002, and as Shadow Spokesperson for Work and Pensions from July to November 2002. During this first spell on the front benches, Bercow publicly said that he did not think he was ruthless enough to reach the top of politics. In November 2002, when the Labour government introduced the Adoption and Children Act, which would allow unmarried gay and heterosexual couples to adopt children, Duncan Smith imposed a three-line whip requiring Conservative MPs to vote against the bill, rather than allowing a free vote. Arguing that it should be a free vote, Bercow defied the whips and voted with Labour, then resigned from the front bench. As a backbencher he was openly critical of Duncan Smith's leadership.
In November 2003, the new Conservative leader Michael Howard appointed Bercow as Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. Bercow went on to clash with Howard over taxes, immigration and the invasion of Iraq, and was sacked from the front bench in September 2004 after telling Howard that Ann Widdecombe was right to have said that there was "something of the night about him". Bercow has a long-standing interest in Burma and frequently raised issues of democracy and genocide in the country. In 2006, he was a patron of the Tory Reform Group. In 2001, he supported the ban on MPs becoming members of the Monday Club.
Bercow was formerly the treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Tribal Peoples, an APPG composed of over 30 cross-party MPs which aims to raise parliamentary and public awareness of tribal peoples.
Bercow won the Stonewall award for Politician of the Year in 2010 for his work to support equality for lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Stonewall gave him a score of 100% for always voting for its position on gay equality issues in parliament between 2007 and 2009.
Opposition MP of the Year
In 2005, Bercow won the Channel Four/Hansard Society Political Award for 'Opposition MP of the Year'. He said:In addition to pursuing a wide variety of local issues, I have attempted to question, probe and scrutinise the Government in the House of Commons on important national and international topics which concern people. Over the last 12 months, I have constantly pressed the case for reform of world trade rules to give the poorest people on the planet a chance to sell their products and improve their quality of life. The plight of the people of Darfur, Western Sudan, has also been a regular theme. They have suffered too much for too long with too little done about the situation. I shall go on arguing for Britain to take the lead in the international community in seeking decisive action for peace and justice.
Rumours of defection
Following the defection of Conservative MP Quentin Davies to the Labour Party in June 2007, there were persistent rumours that Bercow was likely to be the next Conservative MP to leave the party.Bercow did not at that time defect to Labour, but in September 2007, accepted an advisory post on Gordon Brown's government's review of support for children with speech, language and communication special needs. The Conservative Party chairman, Caroline Spelman, confirmed that this appointment was with the consent of the Conservative Party. Bercow had a long-term interest in this topic, as his son Oliver has been diagnosed with autism.