A typical Trump rage, Michael Wolff reported in Fire and Fury, would begin with the president’s “exaggeration or acting and then devolve into the real thing: uncontrollable, vein-popping, ugly-face, tantrum stuff. It got primal.”
This lack of control – of a piece with the president’s Twitter tantrums, his staggering turnover of senior staff, the prompt transformation of said staff into contemptuous survivors – has been widely interpreted as a further, telling indicator of his unfitness for high or, for that matter, any office.
As with Gordon Brown, whose staff would be warned about “flying Nokias”, Prince Charles (throwing, breaking, shouting) and Naomi Campbell (an inadvertently weaponised mobile), there have been few attempts, even by their friends and loyalists, to portray this extreme volatility as a natural response to high-status stress.
Brown failed to deflect, before the 2010 general election, reports about his anger and the associated projectiles – objects reportedly ranging from a laser printer to, according to one of Andrew Rawnsley’s sources, newspapers, pens and Coke cans. It is probably a mercy, from a global security perspective, that individuals prone to this form of problematic behaviour reliably focus their outbursts – give or take some peer-to-peer arm-yanking – on subordinates with no immediate means of redress.
But perhaps too much has been made of the above, elite temper tantrums? Maybe, to take a lead from current defenders of the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, we should be looking more critically at the people who report them? And, similarly, at the staff whose behaviour causes high-profile screamers and phone-throwers to go, as Wolff puts it, primal? In the case of Bercow, who is the subject, along with two less high-profile male MPs, of a compelling Newsnight investigation into bullying within Westminster, his accusers have already been depicted as probably asking for it.
The Labour MP Barry Sheerman has tweeted that if the Speaker banged tables, we should be more “surprised that our Speaker didn’t throw a table or two at the ghastly little cabal that opposed reform of parliament!” His colleague, the cerebral life peer Andrew Adonis, dismissed allegations of angry Bercow behaviour made by the former Black Rod David Leakey as an “angry outburst from the retired ex-protocol officer of the House of Lords who didn’t like the fact that the current Speaker is a reformer”.
Along with various procedural improvements, in particular, ones which may or may not have communicated themselves to the wider public, favouring backbench MPs, the Speaker has committed himself, for example, to outreach work designed to improve young people’s understanding of parliament and to promoting equalities at Westminster. Last year he called for “zero tolerance of sexual harassment or bullying here at Westminster or elsewhere”.
Bercow’s subsequent lecture to Boris Johnson, after the latter addressed Emily Thornberry as an accessory of her husband’s, and his well-advertised reluctance to host Trump, have further endeared him to Labour members who would now prefer us not to dwell on troubling allegations about Bercow’s own conduct. Maybe it’s just hard to compute. Some will recall the recent difficulty in some quarters in believing that senior British charity officials could also be common-or-garden sexual predators.
To listen to the Commons chaplain, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, for example, is to gather that unpleasant accusations might well circulate around a person who is, like the “very kind, caring and compassionate” Mr Bercow (the Commons speaker for almost a decade), “not an establishment figure”.
But most Bercow supporters don’t seem to be suggesting that Newsnight’s findings, which include an almost £90,000 payoff on condition of a non-disclosure agreement, a smashed phone and a secretary signed off with post-traumatic stress disorder, are unreliable. Rather, they are just not serious enough to listen to, unlike those relating to Brown, Trump, Prince Charles and Naomi Campbell. Come back when he’s thrown a table. By that time, there might even be a better system for reporting Westminster bullying, Bercow-inspired reforms having yet to include a system for investigating alleged Speaker misconduct that is not under Speaker supervision.
Even allowing for the possibility that history, when she gets round to it, will find an innocent Bercow’s trouser innovation to have been among the great parliamentary reforms, the current rubbishing of the Newsnight report can’t really help, outreach-wise. To the non-Westminster villager, the complaints against Mr Bercow – shouting, throwing, table-banging, belittling, mimicking – might sound like precisely the sort of allegations they would expect to be investigated in their own workplace and all the more so in a national legislature boasting scores of committed trade unionists, such as Westminster’s Sheerman.
That some leading Bercow supporters should discover that progressive principles are fully compatible with trivialising, as Sheerman has, reports of bullying, only confirms a divide between civilian and parliamentary life that Bercow’s outreach has yet to fix. In a workplace culture where grown men will still, without embarrassment, emit chicken noises, use the word “frit” and consider “big beast” a compliment, maybe it’s inevitable that people who shout at colleagues come to seem more impressive than people who complain about it.
But Bercow’s claim, as Speaker, has been – occasionally with justification – that he is different. In whatever way, in the unlikely event of an inquiry, he is found to have treated his staff, some of us will always cherish the day he wiped the sexist smirk off Boris Johnson’s face. Then again, reflexively to defend Bercow because he’s humbled Johnson, snubbed Trump and got himself viscerally detested by the Daily Mail, is to endorse the pitiful tribal routine whereby uncontrollable male rage is now being reinvented as the impatient zeal of a reformer. Trump, anyway, will understand how easily folks confuse the two.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist