Speaker’s wife dismisses picture furore

London Evening Standard/London

Sally Bercow

A defiant Sally Bercow yesterday insisted that the Evening Standard’s photographs of her wearing only a bedsheet were all in the best possible taste.
The wife of Commons Speaker John Bercow dismissed a furore over the pictures as "a storm in a bedsheet” and "a bit of fun”.
"I think it’s quite a tasteful photograph,” said the 41-year-old, who stunned Westminster by agreeing to the portrait for yesterday’s ES magazine, accompanied by an interview in which she spoke of the "aphrodisiac” effect of their life at the Palace of Westminster.
She admitted they had not gone down entirely well with Bercow, telling Victoria Derbyshire’s BBC Radio 5 Live show: "My husband’s not exactly thrilled about it but he’s pretty cool really.”
To critics who said her actions reflected on the Speaker, Sally snorted: "Does that mean therefore I should be a wife who walks dutifully three paces behind my husband and keeps her mouth shut and makes cucumber sandwiches?” She added: "I am a personality. I’ve got ambitions of my own and it was just meant to be a bit of fun.”
However, Sally, whose colourful Twitter comments and forthright views have made her a household name to rival her husband, admitted: "I was probably stupid to do it”.
"I was a fool really to agree to be photographed in a sheet. I didn’t really think through the implications. I didn’t know I was going to be photographed in a sheet until I got there.” Sally said the piece "was all meant to be a bit of harmless fun” as part of the newspaper’s Valentine’s Day coverage and she was surprised by the reaction.
"It has completely backfired on me and I look a complete idiot. The trouble is, because I’m married to the Speaker, whatever I do is put in the media and used to get at him.”
Sally added: "I think the Standard ran a headline saying ‘Sally Bercow spills bedroom secrets’. I did not. If you read the copy I just talked very ordinarily.”
Perhaps not as "ordinarily” as MPs expect from the wife of the Speaker, however, as previously unpublished comments made to the Standard disclose.
Asked what she found attractive in men, she said: "Well, I can’t say height can I because my husband’s much shorter than me, so I better not say I find height attractive. I don’t like smart particularly. I like smart/casual, I guess. Suits don’t do it for me and certainly tweed jackets and all the typical Conservative MP regalia that my husband used to wear, corduroys and tweed jackets don’t do it for me at all. So no, he now just wears normal clothes jeans and things at the weekend.”