Famous Half Jews: John Bercow

[Gary Freedman]

John Simon Bercow (born 19 January 1963) is the current Speaker of the British House of Commons, having been elected to this office in June 2009. He has been the Member of Parliament for Buckingham since 1997. Until he became Speaker, he sat in the House as a member of the Conservative Party. He served in the Shadow Cabinet under former Conservative leaders Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

Born in Edgware, London, the son of a Jewish taxi driver, Bercow attended Finchley Manorhill, a large comprehensive school in North London.

In his youth, Bercow was ranked Britain's No.1 junior tennis player. However a bout of glandular fever ended his chances of pursuing a career as a professional tennis player.

Bercow graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Government from the University of Essex in 1985. Professor Anthony King remembers: "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, becoming Secretary of its Immigration and Repatriation Committee. However at the age of 20 he left the club, citing the views of many of the club's members as his reason.

After graduating from university, Bercow was elected as the last National Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) from 1986-87. The FCS was then broken up by the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Norman Tebbit, reportedly for being too right-wing. Bercow attracted the attention of the Conservative leadership, and in 1987 he was appointed by Tebbit as Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Collegiate Forum (the successor organisation of the FCS) 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. He later worked in a political lobbying job with the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

With fellow Conservative Julian Lewis, Bercow ran an Advanced Speaking and Campaigning course for over ten years, which trained over 600 Conservatives (including several current MPs) in campaigning and communication techniques. He has also lectured in the United States to students of the Leadership Institute.

In 1986, Bercow was elected as a Conservative councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth. He served as a councillor for four years. In 1987, he was appointed the youngest Deputy Group Leader[citation needed] in the United Kingdom.

In 1995, Bercow was appointed as a Special Adviser to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Jonathan Aitken. After Aitken's resignation to fight a libel action, Bercow served as a Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for National Heritage, Virginia Bottomley.

Bercow was an unsuccessful Conservative candidate in the 1987 General Election in Motherwell, and again at the 1992 General Election in Bristol South. In 1996, he paid £1,000 to hire 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 has since increased his majority, having been elected at the 2005 General Election by a margin of 18,129 votes.

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 Party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He served as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury from September 2001-July 2002, and as Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions from July-November 2002. During this first spell on the front bench, Bercow publicly stated that he thought his lack of ruthlessness would prevent him from rising any further through the ranks. 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. In protest, Bercow defied the whips and voted with the government arguing that it should be a free vote. He then resigned from the front bench. As a backbencher he was openly critical of Duncan Smith's leadership, declaring that he was about as likely to "meet an Eskimo in the desert" as Duncan Smith was to win the next general election.

In November 2003, the new Conservative Leader Michael Howard appointed Bercow as Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. However he went on to clash with Howard over taxes, immigration and Iraq, and was sacked from the frontbench in September 2004 after telling Howard that Ann Widdecombe was right to have said that there was "something of the night about him".

Bercow -- like Professor Claire Hirshfield -- has a long-standing interest in Burma and frequently raised issues of democracy and genocide in the country. In 2006 he was made a Patron of the Tory Reform Group. In 2001, he also supported the ban on MPs becoming members of the Monday Club, an organisation of which he is a former member (see above).

In 2005, Bercow won the Channel Four/Hansard Society Political Award for 'Opposition MP of the Year'. He said:

I shall treasure this award and I am extremely grateful to my colleagues for it. Winning it has raised the question of what is good opposition. I think that the public is fed up with one politician simply ranting at another politician for the sake of it. The public deserves to see a more measured and constructive approach to politics. 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.

Following the defection of Conservative MP Quentin Davies to the Labour Party in June 2007, there were persistent Westminster rumours that Bercow was likely to be the next Conservative MP to leave the party.

Despite the rumours, Bercow did not defect to the Labour Party. However in September 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Bercow had accepted an advisory post on the Labour 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 he mentioned in a speech in the House of Commons on 1 February 2008, his son Oliver has been diagnosed with autism.

In 2008, John Bercow was asked by the Labour Cabinet members Ed Balls and Alan Johnson to produce a substantial review of children and families affected by speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). After the report, the government pledged £52 million to raise the profile of SLCN within the education field.

The review looks at the extreme consequences communication problems can lead to – from initial frustration at not being able to express oneself, to bullying or being bullied at school, fewer job prospects and even the descent into criminality.

The interim report highlighted a number of core issues: that speech, language and communication are not only essential life skills but fundamental human rights; that early identification of problems and intervention is important to avoid social problems later on; and that the current system of treatment is patchy, i.e. there is a need for services to be continually provided for children and families from an early age.

In the financial years 2007-8, 2006-7, 2004-5 and 2002-3 Bercow occupied joint first position in a league table of highest-claiming members of the House of Commons, while in 2003-4 he was the joint third. However, in 2008/09 Bercow's total expenses were amongst the lowest claimed by MPs (coming 631st out of 645).

During the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal, it was revealed that Bercow changed the designation of his second home on more than one occasion – meaning that he avoided paying capital gains tax on the sale of two properties. He also claimed just under £1,000 to hire an accountant to fill in his tax returns. Bercow denied any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay £6,508 to cover any tax which he may have had to pay to HM Revenue and Customs.

Bercow had long campaigned quietly to become Speaker and was touted as a successor to Michael Martin. On 20 May 2009, he officially announced his intention to stand in the Speakership election which had been triggered by Martin's resignation, and launched his manifesto for the job. In the first round of the election on 22 June, Bercow received 179 votes – more than any other candidate, but short of the majority required for victory. In the third and final round of voting later that day, he defeated Sir George Young by 322 votes to 271, and was approved by the Queen at 10pm that night as the 157th Speaker.

Bercow's election as Speaker was controversial because he is believed to have had the support of very few MPs from his own party. Fellow Conservative MPs generally viewed Bercow with distrust due to his changing political views (having moved over the years from being very right-wing to become more socially liberal, leading to clashes with past party leaders), his acceptance of an advisory role from the Labour government (a party he had often been rumoured to be on the verge of joining), his general lack of good relations with fellow MPs from his own party, and his vigorous campaigning for the Speaker's job. It has been speculated that he received the votes of as few as three of his fellow Conservative MPs. However he received the votes of a large number of Labour MPs, many of whom were angered at the way they perceived Michael Martin to have been hounded out of the job and wanted his replacement to be someone who was not a favourite son of the Conservative Party.

Bercow is the first Jewish Speaker, the first Speaker to have been elected by an exhaustive ballot, and the first Speaker not to wear traditional court robes while presiding over the House of Commons.

Bercow married Sally Illman in December 2002. The couple first met in 1989 when they were attending a Conservative Student conference. Sally was then a Conservative-supporting undergraduate student, however she left the Conservative Party in the early 1990s and has been a member of the Labour Party since 1997. She is currently the Treasurer of her local Labour Party branch (Pimlico and St James'). Bercow's marriage to Sally was among the factors which fuelled the persistent rumours that he was considering defecting to the Labour Party.

The Bercows have three children: Oliver (born December 2003), Freddie (born November 2005) and Jemima (born April 2008).

Bercow's constituency website states: "Outside of politics, John enjoys tennis, squash, swimming, reading and music. He is a qualified lawn tennis coach."