The Sun has run as an exclusive today that John Bercow’s bullying of Robert Rogers – which the former Clerk of the Commons reported earlier in the week – was so bad his health collapsed and he was forced to take early retirement. Certainly tallies with his bullying of his secretary Kate Emms which resulted in her being diagnosed with PTSD…

“A friend told The Sun: “Bercow told Robert he was no good, he was useless, he was f***ing this and f***ing that, all of the time.

“He tried to make him feel completely worthless, without ever making any specific allegations of what he was supposed to have done wrong.

“The clerks used to call it Bercow’s ‘carpet chewing’.”

While Lord Lisvane has only just come forward with the allegations, the truth about their relationship has been swirling around Westminster for over half a decade. In 2015, Michael Cockerell documented their relationship when, after retiring early for undisclosed reasons, Bercow abandoned the tradition of hosting a retirement do for Rogers. Choosing instead to host a rock concert in Speaker’s House…

Michael Fabricant appeared on the Matt Forde podcast in 2014, once again refusing to give away the reason for Rogers’s early retirement, tipping off a journalist present that the true reason might be something he wanted to pursue and noting the cause wasn’t something the clerk himself had done.

Westminster knew this was going on, yet it took Bercow’s retirement to really get it out in the open; showing just how terrified Commons employees were of him. Now the Labour party – supposedly the party of workers’ rights – want to give him a peerage…