John Bercow joining the Labour Party has become a battle of spin

The Conservatives are looking to play down the move at the end of a week that has been anything but easy, writes Chris Stevenson

John Bercow has said he recently joined the Labour Party (AP)

The move by former Commons speaker John Bercow to join the Labour Party was the subject of much debate over the weekend.

One of our readers said that the Conservatives "may well rue the day they said goodbye" to Bercow – who was the MP for Buckingham between 1997 and 2019. As the speaker has to be politically impartial, Bercow had to resign from the party when he took up the post but has said he "didn't have the slightest desire" to rejoin the Conservative Party once he stepped down.

Tories have been quick to point to the suggestion that Bercow is after the peerage that was denied to him by Boris Johnson's government, but the former MP told Sky News that what he is "motivated" by "is a commitment to equality, social justice and internationalism".