Sam Leith: Mind your own beeswax but let’s buy Bercow pics

Tired of hearing about MPs’ expenses? Fed up with petty, trivial, parochial ad hominem snarking when there are larger issues of global politics and economics more deserving of our attention? Nope? Me neither.

Let us all give thanks, then, to those enterprising souls who used a Freedom of Information request to get the skinny on John Bercow’s expenses bill. A minor outbreak of tut-tutting has greeted his dropping a couple of grand on hand-finished beeswax candles, but what really caught the imagination was that Mr Bercow spent £210 on 350 postcard-sized images of himself. These, his office says, “are sent out on request”.

Nobody thinks Mr Bercow is an egomaniac or a fantasist, still less that a man of his standing would spend taxpayers’ money frivolously: we must assume the Speaker’s office had these cards printed up to meet a concrete public demand. There is, in other words, a small but real market for postcard-sized portraits of John Bercow MP. This is one of the odder facts about our democracy.

Who are these Bercow portrait-requesters? Are they constructing shrines? Training guard dogs? Suffering from ejaculatio praecox? Or do they, as I prefer to suppose, simply feel a little lifting of the mood every time they look at Mr Bercow’s cheeky little face and funny black-and-gold robes? That is a matter for them. And it is a free country. Collecting images of John Bercow is, when you think about it, no more intrinsically silly than collecting stamps, antique porcelain thimbles or editions of Wisden. Tolerance of individual eccentricity is one of the pillars of the British way of life.

The harder question is: is meeting this demand what you might call a natural state monopoly, or a role that can, and should, be taken by the private sector? A similar argument rages over the BBC. There is a demand for The Great British Bake Off, but should licence-payers stump up for it, or can we leave that sort of thing to the likes of ITV or Sky and concentrate instead on “core programming”?

The provision of free portraits of John Bercow, hard heads will say, is a luxury rather than a necessity. In an age in which universal benefits are being drastically cut back, it’s hard to argue that this one should survive.

My suggestion, then, would be a combination of means-testing and market-led reform. If, rather than being given away, portraits of Mr Bercow were sold at the modest price of £1 each the public coffers would realise a profit of £140 on each batch of 350. You could see this as a version of BBC Worldwide, which sells rights to BBC programmes abroad and ploughs the profits back into programme-making.

There’s every reason to suppose the market would support that price: a cardboard mask of Mr Bercow (“fun for stag/hen parties”) is, as I write, being offered on eBay for £2.89. We can proceed with cautious optimism, though an independent ombudsman — OfBerc, or similar — would likely need to regulate the industry, and an open and transparent tendering process gone through.

As well as raising valuable funds towards paying off the deficit and defraying the investment in hand-finished beeswax candles, a thriving market in postcard-sized portraits of John Bercow will add to the psychic wellbeing of us all.

Age cannot wither her, nor Hollywood

Hooray for Julianne Moore. She’s a first-rate actress whose career really got under way in her 40s, and at 55 she’s still getting leading roles. She tells an interviewer she would never contemplate plastic surgery: “There’s nothing wrong with taking care of yourself — being healthy and getting enough rest and eating well — but I’m not going to be, or look, any less 55 than I am. I will say to my friends, ‘For crying out loud, put on a hat, wear some sunscreen!’ But I wouldn’t tell them to get a facelift.”