Guest post by Samira Shackle
The Evening Standard has published a no-holds barred interview with Sally Bercow, wife of John, the Commons speaker.
Revealing that she plans to run for parliament as a Labour candidate, she gives all the skeletons in her closet a good airing: “I had no stop button”, she says, describing herself as a “ladette” who drank two bottles of wine a day. She adds: “I would end up sometimes at a bar and someone would send a drink over, and I’d think, ‘Why not?’ and we’d go home together.”
Can you hear the screeches of excitement from Daily Mail towers? (impressively, they’ve managed to fit all the key words into the headline – “Sally Bercow: I was a binge-drinking ladette who downed two bottles of wine a day and had one-night stands”)
But, perhaps more interestingly given her husband’s party alliance, she also – in no uncertain terms – sets out her opinion of David Cameron and his so-called “progressive” policies:
He’s just a merchant of spin. I think he’s really an archetypal Tory. He favours the interests of the few over the mainstream majority. Deep down, I do think the Tory party is for the privileged few and what it stands for isn’t in the interests of most ordinary people. They’re not really interested in opportunity for all. He has his children at state school now but let’s see what happens at secondary level. There’s not a real commitment to the state sector among the Tories. The vast majority of the shadow cabinet send their children privately.
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She doesn’t stop there, reserving further criticism for grammar schools: “I don’t even want to send the children to the grammars in John’s constituency. I’m strongly against selection, because it entrenches privilege.”
John Bercow has long occupied an uncertain grey area between party lines, with many predicting that he would defect to Labour back in 2007. As Benedict Brogan points out, this attack on grammar schools will not go down well in his Buckingham constituency, where they are a source of pride.
Could it cost him his seat?
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