Some are born embarrassing, some achieve embarrassment and politicians have embarrassment thrust upon them. Sally Bercow, wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, is the latest person to make a prominent political relative blush.
It is not so much that she confesses to having been a “binge drinker”. It’s that this would-be Labour politician, this wife of a Conservative MP, has branded David Cameron — leader of her husband’s party and the man hoping to persuade Britain to entrust him with leading the country — as a “merchant of spin”, as “an archetypal Tory” who “favours the interests of the few over the mainstream majority”.
This kind of curse is more common in America than it is in Britain. The White House seemed to serve as a Petri dish for cultivating awkward kin.
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Bill Clinton might have been the family’s most embarrassing Clinton were it not for his oafish brother, Roger (Secret Service codename: “Headache”), a hillbilly and former cocaine addict who threatened to depose the petrol-pump attendant Billy Carter as the most mortifying White House brother ever. Billy, Jimmy Carter’s brother, put his name on a beer and registered as a paid agent for the Libyan Government. Who knows where to start with Sarah Palin’s embarrassing relatives?
Britain hasn’t been immune. Harold Macmillan had to weather his wife’s long affair with Lord Boothby. Violet Attlee, wife of the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, always voted Tory. Denis Thatcher had several embarrassing relatives.
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But you can’t help feeling that Sally Bercow needn’t strain so hard to embarrass her husband. John Bercow, like so many politicians, is more than capable enough of embarrassing himself.