One of the peculiarities, indeed the unavoidable pitfalls of being an American consumer of news, is that the subtleties of international politics often evade my grasp. If not my grasp, as if to say my intellection, they certainly escape by awareness and my concern. Being ever the center of attention around which lesser satellite-nations revolve, America—this noble land to which my allegiance remains forever pledged—has become accustomed to others looking to it for a demonstration and a show, while not deigning to reciprocate the exchange. Sadly, we’ve become quite incurious in the process, bothering ourselves little about the goings-on in the foreign affairs of other states.
In my attempt to seek political pastures somewhat further afield, to broaden my provincial scope into a slightly more international view, one affair of state has captured my eye. Rather, it was a representative of a state upon whom my fascination had fallen. A man of whose slight stature and of whose towering import the American public is surely and sadly unaware, the English statesman John Bercow—the speaker of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom—is retiring at the end of next month. Come the 31st of October, an ominous day in more ways than one, the diminutive, combative, often garrulous, and always eloquent Bercow will descend from his position atop England’s most cherished assembly. Exiting this chamber of stiff-lipped Conservatives and Labor Party devotees, of titular Tories and of custom-weary Whigs, Bercow will leave behind a House of Commons mired in acrimony and disrepair.
The fault, of course, is not entirely his; the House over which he presides has been, since at least the year 2016, in an intractably schismatic state. On the one side of this chasm, between which—one might add—the future of the United Kingdom stands with tremulous knees, the advocates of Brexit clamor for the consummation of the people’s will. The citizens and the nations of which the U.K. is composed (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) voted in that year on David Cameron’s explosive and probably ill-conceived referendum asking whether or not they should leave the European Union altogether. Never before had a single issue provoked a society as entirely as did this. No prior issue to which a plebiscite had been set had seen so many ballots cast—of which, as we know, the majority answered in the affirmative. Not expecting this result and unencouraged by what it might portend, the liberal wing of Parliament began a campaign of dithering and delay. Loath to effectuate the people’s decision, to ossify their democratic will, British MPs have stalled their kingdom’s detachment from the continent for over three years. The successor to former Prime Minister Theresa May, the bumptious Boris Johnson, now finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to reap what the British population has sowed.
It’s under these circumstances that Bercow takes his premature leave. Ostensibly a “Euro-phile” (as opposed to those Eurosceptics for whom there’s no other feasible option but to leave and to reclaim British sovereignty), Bercow’s politics seem to have evolved as the situation’s grown untenable. Originally, upon his arrival to Parliament, he was of a more conservative bent (thought that certainly doesn’t classify him as necessarily contemptuous of the E.U.). But it’s not to his personal political agenda that my attention turns. I haven’t acquired sufficient knowledge of it to judge it one way or the other.
Embarrassed though I am to admit it, I only learned of Bercow’s existence, much less of his political inclinations and his imminent expiry, a bit earlier this past week. As is my aimless wont, I stumbled into a few of his “greatest moment” highlights on YouTube—videos to which that site was ever so kind, intuitive, and dare I say intrusive to avert my eyes. Immediately, I was dazzled by his idiosyncratic wit and the clever acerbity of his thought. Combining aspects of both statesman and of showman, Bercow appeared entirely at ease atop the dais or on the stage. His rejoinders, while always intelligent and respectful, were invitations to laughter from the crowd. His commentary, usually spoken in a measured and disinterested tone, was a lofty standard to which any MP might aspire. Amongst the monotony of Parliamentary quibbles and the enmity of its disputes, he was a self-contained comedy. He was a reliquary of insight and a breath of fresh thought in whose cooling presence all would be made to feel alive.
Excluded from the highest ascendancy of British society, the place from which most of that kingdom’s eminent statesmen were selected, Bercow seems to have achieved his great success in spite of the humility of his beginnings. His father was a motorist of the public weal—a cab driver by another name. His mother was Jewish, and by that creed’s matrilineal law of descent, so too was he. This made him, from the outset, an unwitting minority—a guiltless designation with which I’m profoundly empathetic. A vaunted tennis player in his youth, in age his greatest skill became that of the repartee. The sword of the spoken word would become his sport. Ailed by a permanent condition of respiratory distress, he was made to relinquish his pursuit of his tennis dreams. But, like a youthful stuttering Demosthenes, he trained his oratory toward a state of eloquence. Considering his origins and his impairments, the status to which he was able to ascend is all the more impressive, as it was with that grandiloquent Greek.
I mean this entry not as an encomium for a man about whom I hardly know a thing. Perhaps there’s much more about Bercow that, if exposed before my view, I’d heartily despise. Doubtless, any inhabitant of the island could abridge me of his shortcomings and his foibles—but are we not all men, a wretched and erroneous species to whom foibles are simply inherent? While not typically prone to political panegyrics nor eulogistic declarations, I simply felt in witnessing this man, an urge to comment on the rarity, the perspicacity, the Voltairean wit, and the Ciceronian subtlety of his manner. I know not if the U.K. will be better off upon his departure, but I know I’ll be dispossessed of a fabulous source of English entertainment in which I all-too-briefly relished. The coming aftershocks of Brexit don’t, at least at this point, appear to be as conducive to distant fun.
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