Celebrity Big Brother 2011: Sally Bercow has made me feel sorry for John
Spouse of ill repute: Sally Bercow at the Big Brother launchTwo holiday weeks in the heat of Croatia must have sent me peculiar. Maybe it was too much of that Dalmatian red plonk, washing down the cevapcici sausages and pongy sheeps cheese.
Or did the cabin pressure on the Thomson Airways flight from Dubrovnik do something to my inner balance?
But the weird sensation I felt yesterday morning was decidedly unsettling, and I write these words with a metaphorical cold flannel applied to my brow.
The condition began when I read in the Mail about my old foe John Bercow, Speaker of the Commons, and how he seems to have lost weight and succumbed to terrible glooms about his ghastly wife Sally the Alley.John Bercow! The very name is normally enough to have me reaching for my bazooka and fastening my chin strap.
But hang on a moment. What was this? Could it be? Yes, doctor, it jolly well could. Quite extraordinary. Sympathy.
I actually found myself feeling sorry for the little tinpot uppity. See? I managed to say the word. S-s-s-s-sorry. Again. Undeniable.
A photograph of a solitary Mr Bercow in India certainly seemed to confirm the weight loss. Gone, moreover, was the customary veneer of maddening self-esteem.
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The photograph suggested, instead, a shrivelled, greying worrier, glum-faced, deflated. Reduced.
The unlovely Mrs Bercow has gone thigh-striding off to TVs Celebrity Big Brother, where she has been behaving with all the decorum of an out-of-work Black Sea belly dancer.
The 41-year-old Hooray Henrietta, educated partly at Marlborough, ! partly i n the gutters of London, has boasted about how she outwitted her pint-sized husband.
A paragon of taste and restraint: Sally Bercow poses in front of the palace of westminsterShe is reported as saying that she persuaded him to agree to her TV stunt by giving him a dirty weekend of breathless entertainment. Nice.This, remember, is the same paragon of taste and restraint who posed in front of the Palace of Westminster wearing nothing but a (not altogether clean-looking) bedsheet.
This is the same fragrant lovely who gushed about how living in the Speakers grace-and-favour mansion in the Palace of Westminster sauced up her mating habits.
'At his wits' end': Speaker John Bercow in India this weekThis is the same would-be Labour MP who, with classic post-modern urban ennui, criticised the products of firms like Thorntons a yuck tasting rip-off and Carpetright overrated when it emerged they were having to lay off British workers.
Since she entered the Big Brother house, she has donned a bedsheet once again, had a good blub in the loo after learning shed been put up for eviction, and been overheard gossiping unkindly about the Jedward pop twins with her new pal Paddy Doherty, star of that august programme My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.
Discussing chores around the house as opposed to the House, where Mr Squeaker conducts such an important role Sally observed: Well, my husband puts a smile on my face when he unloads the dishwasher and makes me a cup of tea, and mops the floor.
Just by way of plopping the cherry on top of the three-tiered cake, slapper Sal has hired that gold medallist of tat, Monsieur Max Clifford, as her publicist. As a barrister might say after clinching his case, no further questions, mlud.
Friends of Mr Bercow, quoted in the Sunday media, suggested th! e Speake r was at his wits end. Not all was well in the Bercow marriage, we were told.
Allies were said to have advised him to seek an end to the marriage. These matters were vouchsafed, as is the custom, on a non-attributable basis, but they were reported by a prominent Fleet Street political editor and there would appear to have been no attempt by the Speakers well-funded, richly-staffed office to correct them.
It was also stated, surely accurately, that Mr Bercows supporters now accept that the behaviour of Mrs Bercow is damaging the chance of their man retaining the Commons Speakership.
Exposure: Bercow dresses up in the Big Brother house with co-contestant Darryn LyonsA Labour MP, Kate Hoey, went public with a demand that not-so-succulent Sally forego much of the 160,000 fee she is being offered for taking part in the Channel Five show.
Miss Hoey thinks some of the fee could be handed back to the Treasury to compensate the taxpayer for the rent-free palatial digs the Bercows occupy on the banks of the Thames.
By the way, that 160,000 filming fee is but a fraction of the money most Celebrity Big Brother contestants reckon can be made from the programme.
The calculation of this particular end of the television industry is pretty blunt: the worse you behave, the more you stand to make in fees from subsequent publicity appearances, walk-on parts, interviews and commercial involvements.
It would be a surprise if Mrs Bercow did not manage to turn at least half a million quid from this squalid venture.
Others have made millions. Sell your reputation and you count your spondoolicks. That is the only reason for doing shows like this.
All of this should, I suppose, have had me slapping my thighs and roaring I told you those Bercows were wrong uns.
I could have brandished various gruesome passages I have scratched out in the past about this unsuitable, publicity-crazed, p! ower-gob bling, status-degrading duo who inhabit Speakers House.
The couple attend the Royal Wedding earlier this yearAnd yet, instead, there comes this moral discombobulation this sense of sorrow for the Rt Hon Gentleman for Henpeck South as he gazes westwards from his Indian redoubt and espies a column of black smoke rising from the ruins of his career.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am no saint. I am normally a sucker for schadenfreude. So why do I hesitate to dance on the misfortune of the awful Mr Squeaker?
Two things, I think. The first is that of comradeship to a fellow married being and fellow father. Mr Bercow, in declining to rein in his wife, did the decent, tolerant thing.
This is the 21st century. We husbands can no longer stare down our beards and tell our women to confine themselves to their needlework.
The concomitant of that state of affairs is that wives should have some regard for their husbands feelings.
Modern marriage is a partnership. Both sides must give and take. It looks strongly in this case as though Mrs Bercow has gone high-tailing off to the Big Brother house without a speck of concern for her consort. She would appear to have behaved with supreme selfishness.
The second factor is the fear that if Mr Bercow is damaged and even brought down by this grubby carry-on it will detract from the more serious shortcomings which make him an inadequate Speaker of the House of Commons.
Failing to recognise those demerits will do us no good. In short, I would hate to see him toppled for something so tawdry as the behaviour of his silly, money-grubbing wife.
John Bercow is not a bad Speaker because he is an ex-Tory pipsqueak with a trashy bint.
Sally Bercow's appearance on Big Brother discredits her husband's important role as speaker of the House of Commons
He is a bad Speaker because he is not trusted by the House. He is a bad Speaker because he is a man of such floating principles that he has drifted from the far Right to the insistent Left.
He is a bad Speaker because he appears to regard the Speakership greedily, as a well-paid career option, as a vantage point from which to flick two fingers at his enemies, as a gotcha! position, as revenge.
Not everything he has done as Speaker has been wrong. His time in the Chair has coincided with a welcome revival of Parliamentary sovereignty, in some of which he has played a part.
The past 15 months have been good for Parliament. The new Commons and its committees are scrutinising the executive better than its predecessor did.
But if Parliament is to continue its long-overdue return to prominence in our national life, it must have a Speaker who can command respect. It must have a Speaker who, simply by entering a room, can provoke a sense of awe, inspiring silence and even almost reverence.
It must have a Speaker whose very name is a byword for wisdom and poise and decency and objectivity.
John Bercow was already struggling to meet those high demands. The latest sorry episode, Im afraid, makes his chances of success even slimmer.
Is it not more likely that when this particular Mr Speaker walks into a room, assembled onlookers are likely now simply to point and snigger. And all because of some long-legged, scuttle-jawed doxy.
Poor John.
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