Days after bowing out as Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow has described Brexit as the biggest mistake Britain has made since the second world war.
Bercow, who was persistently accused of bias by Brexit-backing MPs during his term as Speaker, gave a valedictory speech to the Foreign Press Association, revealing himself to be a remainder.
“I don’t think it helps the UK. Brexit is the biggest mistake of this country after the war. I respect [the] prime minister, Boris Johnson, but Brexit doesn’t help us. It’s better to be part of the EU power bloc,” Bercow said, according to the journalist Antonello Guerrera, of La Repubblica, who attended the event in London.
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During his decade-long stint in the Speaker’s chair, Bercow championed the rights of backbenchers, making urgent questions a prominent part of the parliamentary day, for example.
In recent months, he has been accused of bending the rules to allow rebel backbench MPs such as Dominic Grieve and Hilary Benn to constrain the government’s room for manoeuver – including bypassing the so-called Benn act, which forced Johnson to request a delay to Brexit.
At the event, Bercow said: “I respect the prime minister and he has the right to do what he did also in the House of Commons. But my job was to stand up for the rights of the House of Commons. No apology for championing the rights of parliament.”
He rejected recent comments by the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, who described Westminster as a “zombie parliament”.
“He has the material disadvantage of being totally wrong,” he said. “Parliament is no disgrace at all and did its job well.”
Bercow has been replaced as Speaker by the Labour MP Lindsay Hoyle, from Chorley in Lancashire.
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