Sally Bercow, 40, described her battle with drink, her fetish for one night stands in her twenties and criticised David Cameron as a “merchant of spin”.
“I was a big binge drinker in my twenties. I started drinking at Oxford, being a party girl, and it got out of control.
“I got a grip for a while, but in the mid-Nineties I was working in advertising and I would drink wine at lunch then go out and drink a bottle in the evening: most evenings really. I had no stop button.
Asked whether this was as excessive as she implies, she added: “Well, OK. It was sometimes more like two bottles, except I promised John I wouldn’t say that. Have I mucked it up already?”
She became teetotal in 2000 after realising she had put herself in danger. “I was an argumentative, stroppy drunk, picking arguments with my bosses over stupid things. Plus I’d lose my judgment and put myself in danger. I’d fall asleep on the Tube and end up in Epping or Heathrow. And I’d get into unlicensed minicabs in the early hours: all the things we’d tell our daughters not to do.”
Mrs Bercow also confessed to casual sexual encounters fuelled by alcohol. “The weren’t romantic. They were more like flings. I wasn’t looking for love. But it’s true that 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. I liked the excitement of not knowing how a night was going to end. It was all very ladette - work hard, play hard.”
Nadine Dorries, a Tory MP who opposed Mr Bercow’s selection as Speaker, said: “We desperately need to restore both authority and respect to Parliament. What this interview has done is remove any painstaking progress Parliament has made and reduced the Speaker and his office to that of a laughing stock. How can we ask the people to trust us, when the man who holds us to account has such poor judgment that he allowed his wife to give such an appalling self obsessed interview?”
She even made comments about her husband that could be seized upon by his opponents. She revealed that after dating him for six months “he dumped me for being too argumentative". She added: "But you have to remember that he was a Right-wing headbanger at the time. He’s much more rounded and moderate now and he's rethought a lot.”
Ummm. He might be rethinking some more.
And I liked this reader's comment;
It was so toe-curlingly cringeworthy that I couldn't read it through to the end.
1 comment:
I swaw the article in the London Evening Standard on the Tube on my way home late this afternoon. Never expected a precis to pop up on your blog, or any other NZ Blog for that matter.
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