I think everyone who paid any attention at all to British politics knew John Bercow was always Labour at heart:
Mr Bercow – who was a Tory before becoming Commons chair in 2009 – caused fury on the Conservative benches for what they saw as bias in the handling of Brexit wrangling. He finally quit the supposedly impartial post in November 2019, but has now announced that he is a Labour member….
A senior Government source said: ‘This will surprise nobody and shows Labour is still the party of Remain.’
The move to Labour completes an extraordinary political journey for Mr Bercow, originally elected as a Tory MP, from self-confessed ‘hard-Right’ politics in his youth to Labour member. It also marks a sharp break with the tradition that Commons Speakers, who give up party political affiliations on taking that post, stay impartial by retiring to the Lords as crossbench peers.
Mr Bercow told the Trevor Phillips programme on Sky News: ‘It’s not personal against Boris Johnson. I do think that he is someone who has only a nodding acquaintance with the truth in a leap year, and I think that the utter contempt with which he has treated Parliament is lamentable, and I think it has exacerbated the very strong feelings of resentment towards him, because I think a lot of people feel that’s not the way to behave…. ‘Now I’m a private citizen, as Robert Buckland says, I’m entitled to take a political view. And my view is a left of centre view. I identify with Labour values, Labour principles, Labour policies.’
It will surprise precisely no one to learn that John Berkowitz is about as British as Benjamin Netanyahu and Bill Kristol. Remember, identity reliably trumps ideology, and this guy was working as a professional infiltrator from the age of 18. Note his first assignment: “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. However, at the age of 20 he left the club, citing the views of many of the club’s members as his reason.”
It is astonishing, is it not, to observe how many young would-be leaders of the right are actually left-wing foreigners in disguise.