The Rt. Hon. John Bercow | Interview | Cambridge Union (1/2)

thank you hope you feel the same way at the end thank you very much for coming I thought I'd start with a relatively simple question which I see it won't know what it's like so could you tell us what a day in the life of the Speaker of the House of Commons is like there's a certain pattern and predictability to the day we have a thing students called the briefing meeting which takes place at various times on a Monday midday Tuesday at 10:30 Wednesday at 10:30 Thursday at 8:45 and that meeting is with the clerks who sit at the table in front of the speaker and the speaker who chairs that briefing meeting is accompanied by the deputy speakers and a sprinkling of other officials and the purpose of that meeting is just to run through the business of the day that is an absolutely unvarying feature of a sitting day that you go through the business you anticipate what might come up I will make decisions on a any amendments that need to be selected two motions at that point and I have a very keen sense then of what's likely to unfold subject of course to the unpredictability of the debate itself you can't be sure what will happen in the debate and where somebody will say something that is disorderly that will prompt an intervention from the chair but that's a standard feature aside from that I would say typically I would be expected to be in the chair in the chamber for three hours a day which may not sound very much but it was for me very much to be regarded as a sort of de minimis threshold ordinarily exceeded in other words students for better or for worse and you'll make your own judgment of my tenure I took the attitude Gabriel that I would rather be accused of hogging the chair than of being an absentee landlord so three hours was the minimum I tended to be in the chair so I want more than that sometimes four or five six hours the maximum I ever did was teen hours without a break without a visit to the Louvre without the consumption of a meal and that was because I felt that day out of respect for my colleagues and the significance of the arguments on brexit wanting to hear every point of view expressed and everybody expressing it I would try to be there from start to finish and I was there from I didn't announce it in advance because I didn't know whether physically I'd be up to it but I was there from 11:30 in the morning to 1:30 the following morning those are standard features of the day and then interspersed with those very standard features of the preparatory meeting and then the chamber activity the two other staple features of the week for the speaker are meetings with colleagues who wish to see the speaker they might want to apply for a special debate on the subject they might want to come to see me to request permission to use the staterooms of speakers house for a charitable event they might come to advise me of a problem that they've got in raising a particular matter in the chamber is the some way in which I can advise them how to be more successful etc similarly meetings with staff from various directorates a absolutely common place I've got to keep in touch with what's going on across the estate because one thing people don't understand is that the speaker is not just chairing in the chamber that is the best known and most visible function of the speaker but the speaker is also chair of the House of Commons Commission which is the strategic governing body of the house responsible for its staff services and the property of the parliamentary estate so I'm a kind of non-executive chairman of the board if you like so I have to know what's going on in the catering department what's happening in building what's happening in visitor services how we're doing in terms of parliamentary education with schools what is going on in the parliamentary outreach department and so I'm regularly meeting departmental heads as well as of course key figures in the house the leader of the House the shadow need of the house the government Chief Whip the opposition Chief Whip and that really effectively captures what the speaker does on the estate aside from that I would say one other thing and that is the I Gabriel made a point of doing a lot of outreach activity which hadn't been the norm prior to my tenure as speaker so I resolved very early on that I'd like to get out beyond the parliamentary estate particularly on Fridays when the house is usually not sitting to visit schools and universities and voluntary organizations why well to talk about politics and democracy and the role of the speaker and how we operated in what way Parliament was changing how people could access the political process and why doll mattered so I would broadly describe that as a kind of ambassadorial role I tried to be an ambassador for Parliament and a robust advocate of democratic politics and that really summarizes what I did to the best of my limited ability and as the national political temperature rose did that change or break down I mean this you mentioned the leader of the House of Commons your relationship at times became a little fraught well I had mixed relations over a long period with leaders of the house far more good than not I think I interacted with seven leaders of the House during my tenure as either six or seven I think it was seven and I had good relations with a number of them average relations with a couple and on the whole good relations with Jacob Riis MOG I mean Jacob and I ended up often disagreeing about matters towards the end but I would say students that that would be characterized as honorable disagreement Jacob had a particular view as leader of the house about the imperative of the early delivery of brexit though it should be added he himself voted against that are--some a brexit deal on two occasions so insofar as brexit didn't happen and he nevertheless complained about delays to brexit I can only assume that his complaints these partly autobiographical as he himself had caused some of the delay but Jacob felt that brexit should be delivered and his thesis if you will was Parliament's no right to stand in the way Parliament shouldn't be obstructing it Parliament shouldn't be slowing about Parliament shouldn't be arguing the toss with the government and that was his honest and honorable view and I would often say yes but there was a referendum but it is for Parliament now to interpret that verdict and to decide what legislation to pass and whether it needs to be revised amended or improved and so on and that is a very proper and legitimate function of Parliament but I would say my personal relations with Jacob were very good and my relations with Andrea led summers leader of the house were not good I would say that they were bad yes I would say that I would say I think to be accurate that Andrea led some and I had a relationship characterized by trust and understanding I didn't trust her as she didn't understand me and she was the least capable holder of the office in my time a speaker sorry but I mean she was the least capable leader of the house her grasp her procedure was poor I didn't find her very collegiate and you know she's entitled to her views about me but she has tended on the whole to suffer from the quite material disadvantage of being wrong I'm sure we can we can tell her that as when and I think now if she agrees to speak it um you brought us on quite neatly to those days around prorogation and I was wondering what was your reaction when you heard the government decided to parade and what was your action maybe celebration when you heard the ruling of the court when first I heard that the government had opted for a lengthy predation frankly I was shocked and horrified I was by the poolside in Turkey at the time with my family and I had no particular premonition of it and certainly no advance notification from government the government wasn't obliged to tip me off in advance it might have been thought to be courteous did you say but they weren't obliged to do so so in other words I don't take my stand students you know on the basis of a fronted dignity and that wasn't the issue at all about that I wasn't told about it wasn't the point the point was that it was absolutely blindingly obvious to me that announcing in the latter part of August that the government intended to perogy our Levant sometime between the ninth and the 12th of September only to resume the sitting of the house on the 14th of October was in order dramatically to restrict the scope for debate on brexit in the run-up to the European Council on if memory serves me the 17th of October indeed it was a point it seemed to me that was a blindingly obvious that only an extraordinarily sophisticated person caught up his or her own posterior could fail to grasp it now you'd have to be very over sophisticated and very lacking in common sense not to realize that that was what the government was about and I thought the way in which the government tried to deny that and say oh no no no no no it wasn't about denying opportunities for debate on brick's it was something of an insult to the intelligence a quite obviously was and it seemed to me students that it was an abuse of the probation process prorogation ordinary takes place as a prelude to a state opening of parliament on a new parliamentary session it can to be fair take place as the immediate precursor to dissolution that is to say the end of the Parliament as a whole and an election general election to follow but to prorogue for that length of time was in recent decades without precedent and it seemed to me to be an abuse and quite wrong and if the government had felt that it was justified it could perfectly well have put that proposition to the House of Commons for a vote now why didn't the government put that proposition to the House of Commons for a vote because they knew perfectly well that they would lose that vote so instead they decided to go ahead with a piece of canary which I think I described in my statement to the press Association on August the 28th as a constitutional outrage and frankly since I stand by that view it was the wrong thing for the government to do but you don't have to take it from me I mean you just see what happened when the case went to the Supreme Court and I daresay there are some football fans here who's a football fan hands up only a rather small number harsh or a very cerebral Bunch you either arm football fans or you're not prepared to admit things it is the Cambridge Union and it probably regards itself as a bit above football fandom but let me just put it like this they didn't just lose the case in the Supreme Court it wasn't sort of a nip and tuck close run thing which way is it gonna go six five or seven four and the government was comprehensively trounced 11 nil so in answer the second part of your question how did I feel when we came back well I I confess I did feel vindicated because I had said at the time though I thought it was totally wrong it was an active executive Fiat it was not the proper way to treat the House of Commons and the speaker is not supposed to be some Craven lickspittle of the executive branch the speaker supposed to be an authentic robust and hopefully outspoken champion of the rights of Parliament institutionally a members of parliament in vigil a safer and remember right when we came back I did start the proceedings by saying and colleagues welcome back to our usual place of work now it's interesting point how government's react when they lose did ministers come up to me one or all and say Oh mr. Speaker we do apologize we realize now that we got it quite wrong we behaved improperly no their view was that they were right and the court got it wrong and what a source the Supreme Court had and that seems to me to underline the imperative of an independent judiciary because just as no individual office holder can be judge in his or her own cause I mean I obviously feel I could do the job of speaker and presumably the house did otherwise it wouldn't have reelected me three times having elected me first in oh nine I was reelected in 2010 2015 and 2017 but it's not for me to say that I was a fine speaker that's for other people to judge and some people may think I was a good speaker and some people may think I wasn't but equally the government cannot be judge of its own cause where the interpretation of the Constitution and the invocation of procedure is concerned there has to be another repository of power there has to be someone who can say no in the words of the late Lord Denning that wonderful English judge be you ever so high the law is above you and the fact is that the government and the could hardly be a higher authority ordinarily day to day than the government rolled the dice in a way that was widely regarded I think as improper and it was brought to book by the Supreme Court and did that give me satisfaction that in a modern pluralist democracy we've still got an alternative power center that can say sorry government what you've done is improper and they cannot be allowed to stand I was pleased about that so much so that when we came back her and the board of the senior clerks telling me students with some delight the pora gation had not happened that is to say Parliament's session had not been ended because the court had so ruled and the clerk looked to me with a little smile and he said Mr Speaker in the record of the house the attempted prorogation must now be expunged I do like that word expunged and it was promptly expunged from the record I thought I would just used the word three times if you don't object you and even if you do if you use quite a lot of words that most of us wouldn't use quite a lot of the time in particular but the medicament which I'm not even sure the origin of but do you think that's healthy you you said you did I mean not medicament I mean health giving but health restoring with your focus on outreach in making Parliament seem modern and involved and pretty substantial reforms you introduces a speaker do you not feel that people seeing on their nine o'clock use somebody using Dickensian language might have undone a little of your hard work well that's a perfectly fair question I don't know that he did but insofar I didn't think it did undo it because I don't think that people on the whole would say well the trouble with Berko was that he made Parliament completely unintelligible and impenetrable I didn't think people would say that indeed in later year students I must admit in particular I increasingly felt that it was to some extent the duty of the chair when treating of matters relating to rules and procedure and knowing that the particular point being dealt with at the time was quite opaque I thought it's part of my role to explain to people in the gallery watching and by implication to people watching on their television screens or watching Parliament through social media what exactly was going on because otherwise some of our procedures and proceedings can be quite hard to follow I did sometimes reinterpret things so the fact that I now and again used as you would say just get Dickensian language I think is sort of part of an overall peace the truth of the matter is that I suppose I am a slightly curious mix of modernity and tradition for example I am utterly useless myself as any member of my family would tell you with technology I can't help it I've just always been nervous of the new and technologically fairly Philistine aid but I absolutely recognize that technology matters about did start see during my time as Speaker that there were ways in which the house could communicate better with larger groups of people and therefore get a better bang for its back and sometimes I could get a better bang for my buck in terms of hours spent by using technology for example to Skype with schools I had obscured the speaker session every week with either primary school students or secondary school students and I think over a period of a couple of years I did about 75 of those so that was a much more efficient way not quite as personal but a much more efficient way of meeting young people then having to trudge off to schools now I did trudge off to schools and I enjoyed doing that but sometimes you know it was just not manageable they were too far away and there wasn't enough time so I suppose you know on the whole I think I haven't allowed my own sort of personal inadequacies with things like technology to blind me to the fact that they do matter they are important but yeah I'm a mix you know I'm a great believer of organization but I'm not a particularly modern person myself I happen to think that it doesn't matter a flying flamingo if people don't want to wear a tie in the chamber of the House of Commons I remember at a very early stage in my speakership my secretary saying to me mr. speaker you mustn't call mr. McCartney our Prime Minister's Questions and I said sorry why not and he said he's not wearing a tie and to me students that didn't matter I wouldn't have wanted people coming in the chamber wearing football shorts because that isn't in any sense business attire but if people wanted to come into the chamber perhaps with a jacket but not wearing a tie that didn't bother me and eventually we formally abolished the requirement for people to wear ties a requirement that applied only to male members anyway yeah I admit that I like ties I personally enjoy wearing ties I wear bright ties I probably almost owe you an apology I'm wearing a particularly quiet and understated tie today that I often wear rather garish too I say you can enjoy a thing yourself but it doesn't mean that you prescribed it for others or you can be brother averse to something yourself like technology but recognize that actually it's got a key role to play so I think that although we all naturally tend to judge things in terms of what we do and what our habits are there is some merit in seeing how other people operates and getting a sort of sense of what you think overall you know is the preferred wish of a majority in the chamber most people in the chamber are come completely relaxed about whether other colleagues are wearing ties or not in fact most people in the chamber a lot of the time and I don't mean this in a pejorative sense their focus their resolute they're determined they're driven by causes and principles and missions and most people in the chamber therefore a much more preoccupied students with what they are about to say or do than they are much preoccupied with what somebody else is about to say or do you've touched a little there on some of your reforms as speaker those reforms met with some internal say local difficulty and out of that situation how that internal conflict allegations have been made about your conduct do you have a response to those allegation I do frankly when those allegations first surfaced in March 2018 I was absolutely astonished and flabbergasted flabbergasted for it to be put to me that I was guilty of bullying a staff member or members and for the record and I'll reiterate what I've said a number of times in the last couple of years and again more recently over the last couple of weeks when a concerted Norka straight campaigners being waged by critics of mine on this matter I have never bullied anyone anywhere at any time in any way what I have done is for hard for the implementation Gabriel of a reformed prospectus for which I felt I had a democratic mandate having been elected as a reformer and reelected and re-elected and re-elected as a reforming speaker the vast majority of people with whom I worked were either instinctively and intrinsically supportive of that reform mission or even if they weren't natural enthusiastic reformers they were committed to helping me deliver it I can think of one person for example in my office in the speaker's office who served with me for the whole 10 years he was the most magnificent staffer who wouldn't call himself a natural reformer his attitude Gabriel was my responsibility mr. speaker while still where's offering you my best advice is in the end to facilitate what you as Speaker have chosen to do and he once said to me this guy brilliant staffer if the speakership changed tomorrow and your successor wanted things done very differently then again I'd offer my advice and experience but in the end I would fall in behind the new speaker's wishes because that's what I think the staff of the speaker's office should do but the great majority I repeat would either instinctively have supported me or they would have said well it's my duty to help the speaker get this agenda and the great majority of colleagues parliamentary colleagues are supportive as well if something like 70 75 percent of your employment relationships in the course of a career are successful you're not doing badly relationships don't always work and the fact that a particular relationship might not work and a small number of mine a very small minority didn't doesn't mean that one person maltreated another it means just that that that particular relationship didn't work because there was an incompatibility there were clashing objectives in some cases might have been irreconcilable personal differences or whatever the media have never been interested there if they were fair-minded they should be in the fact that the great majority of people who worked in my office did so extremely successfully several of them kept in touch even when they'd left for years large numbers came back to my retirement party came to view the last Prime Minister's Questions I'm still in touch with several of them and a number of them are absolutely likewise bemused and astonished by the allegations of bullying I had a small number of people who were reformed resistant and on the whole they were institutionalized they'd either been in Parliament or in another role or career for a very very very long time they tended to be posh snobbish entitled and long versed not only in having their say but in having their way and when I as the elected speaker said well no we're not going to do it like that we can do it like this they didn't like it and some of those people have been hostile ever since and they are now peddling their hostility through leaks to the media and off-the-record briefings and carefully timed complaints and I think their behavior says a lot more about them than it does about me and my final observation on this matter I'm authorized to share with you is this I appointed the first female and B AME speakers chaplain the right reverend Rose Hudson Wilkin in the history of the House of Commons and we worked together for nine years saw each other the great majority of working days during that nine year period recently to my delight I take vicarious pride students at this Rose has become Bishop of Dover Rose Hudson Wilkin has made very clear to a number of people and she's certainly said to me I can share it with you the following she feels she knows me very well we work closely together as she put it to me John if I thought that I ever witnessed from you anything in any scenario or meeting that even approximated to bullying I would have called you out on it I would have said to you that wasn't the right way to behave you got to do it differently I didn't call you out on such behavior because I never witness such behavior and such behavior simply does not square with all my experience and understanding of you that's roses verdict and I've got a lot more time for Rose than for some of the people whom I've just described you've been picking a fight in recent times if they want to pick a fight I can't stop them you can have different views about my record but I will fight to my dying breath to defend my reputation as somebody who did an honest job to the best of my ability and had very very good relations with the vast majority of people with whom I worked I never have been I am NOT and I never will be a bully one final question before we move to the floor what's the naughtiest thing you've ever done there was a particularly disagreeable primary school teacher of mine who was also mildly sadistic at whom I deliberately kicked the football as hard as I could in the hope of inflicting some injury upon him and he was because I remember where the ball caught him in some danger of having a more high-pitched voice as a result of my kick and I wasn't at the time I think completely candid with him on the matter in other words I don't think I volunteered to him that it was deliberately aimed at him but it was however that was in 1973 so I hope given the lapse of 47 years since it will not be held against me actually on a more serious note Gabriel there is one thing that I did in the past which I have often spoken about in which I think is very much more seriously reprehensible I've had a journey in my political career I started on the hard right and I moved towards the center over a long period I'm much more liberal minded now I never wanted to be a member of any party other than the Conservative Party but I became much more liberal minded and centrist over the years when I was first involved in politics reprehensibly and despicably and incredibly stupidly I was drawn to the hard right and to the speeches and writings of Enoch Powell the laity not Powell who was massively anti-immigration and in favor of her repatriation of New Commonwealth and Pakistani immigrants and I joined the Monday Club which supported that agenda in 1981 and it was only really when I found there was a clash between the abstractly political and the personal that I decided to look for the exit door and the personal was that I found there were quite a lot of people in the Monday grab surprise surprise I should have made this in who are not only anti black and Asian immigration into the UK but also anti-semitic and I am myself of Jewish origin I had no business joining that organisation in the first place it was spectacularly misguided and foolish an objectionable thing to do for which I've many times apologized over the years but I did leave in 1984 36 years ago so on the assumption that most of the August and cerebral members of the Cambridge Union Society believed in the rehabilitation of offenders Act 1974 I would hope that I can be forgiven for my youthful stupidity you

Channel: Cambridge Union

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Keywords: Cambridge Union, Cambridge University, John Bercow, House of Commons, Prorogation

Id: ZbIg7EVe0BM

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020