With the echoes of his wife’s candid confessional about her binge-drinking past still reverberating around Westminster, another ghost from John Bercow’s past has come back to haunt him..jpg)
The John Bercow Guide To Understanding Women was penned for a Conservative student magazine in 1986 when the Speaker was a 23-year-old Lambeth councillor. The comic article also offered advice on how to pick up drunk girls, how to pick up virgins and how to get rid of a girl after sex.
Readers were treated to observations such as “women will settle for anything that breathes and has a credit card” and the excruciating chat-up line: “If you’re free later maybe we could go back to your place and name your breasts.”
At the time Mr Bercow was also the chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students.
A spokesman for the Speaker confirmed that he was the author of the piece, which appeared in Armageddon, a low-budget magazine said to have a “tiny circulation”.
“This article appeared in a magazine that specialised in being both funny and provocative. It in no way reflects the Speaker’s views today,” his spokesman said.
The embarrassing reminder of Mr Bercow’s youth came as the backlash over his wife’s frank interview continued to escalate. Sally Bercow, 40, who has been teetotal since 2000, said that she wanted to expose all her “skeletons” before standing as a Labour councillor for Westminster City Council in the elections next May. In an interview with The Evening Standard on Thursday Mrs Bercow admitted that as a student she was a “stroppy drunk” and admitted that it “got out of control”.
She confessed that she would go home with men who bought her drinks, saying: “I liked the excitement of not knowing how a night was going to end. It was all very ladette — work hard, play hard.”
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