While the Daily Mail was sanguine about the horrific way Priti Patel bullied her civil servants – “life is not an Enid Blyton novel”, it said in one headline – it threw the book at John Bercow with a front-page story about his “shaming”, two further pages inside laden with redacted four-letter words, a Sarah Vine column that accused him of being a “weasel”, and, for good measure, an editorial that affected outrage at the way the former Speaker had allegedly subjected his staff to “verbal abuse”.
Mail staff past and present – and I worked for the newspaper up until the turn of the millennium – are finding all of this hard to take, as verbal abuse has always been a part of the Mail culture, with its grandee Paul Dacre himself notorious for his so-called “vagina monologues” directed at individuals who displease him.
I am inclined to take the line of Helen Minsky – a retired employee of the late Mail diarist Nigel Dempster – who responded on social media by saying what “wimps” they must be in the Commons. She wondered how long they would have lasted in Dempster’s office; she detailed how he subjected his staff (male and female) to physical assaults and casual antisemitism, and had tried to sack her when she had the temerity to become pregnant. He once told an industrial tribunal that asked why he had thrown a copy of Who’s Who at a female staffer that she had “at least been hit by all the right people”.
As for Dacre, I’d recommend that any Mail reader outraged by Bercow might want to book tickets to see my play Bloody Difficult Women at the Riverside Studios in west London. Andrew Woodall not only looks like Dacre, but speaks like him, too. Naturally, it carries a PG rating.
