SALLY Bercow is a household name whom no one knows much about apart from a row about her CV and her redecorating tastes at the Speaker's apartment. "It's my first ever interview," she says, twiddling silver jewellery nervously, though there's a glint of steel in those wide grey eyes.
At nearly six foot, and in patent heels, she towers over me, let alone her husband, the low-slung Commons Speaker. "Someone said I wore flat shoes to make John look bigger. I'd never do that. He gets me in high heels or not at all."
But now it's time for her "skeletons", as she puts it. Deep breath.
"I was a big binge drinker in my twenties," says Bercow, who has just turned 40. "I started drinking at Oxford, being a party girl, and it got out of control.
tag heuer replica"I got a grip for a while, but in the mid-Nineties I was working in advertising and I would drink wine at lunch then go out and drink a bottle in the evening: most evenings really. I had no stop button."
A bottle a day, while not exactly what the doctor ordered, was perhaps not that uncommon for a young career woman on the razzle in the Nineties. "Well, OK. It was sometimes more like two bottles, except I promised John I wouldn't say that. Have I mucked it up already?" Another Bercow bombshell follows. "I want to run for Parliament as a Labour candidate so this has all got to come out and I'd rather tell it myself."
What was she like at her worst? "I was an argumentative, stroppy drunk, picking arguments with my bosses over stupid things. Plus I'd lose my judgment and put myself in danger. I'd fall asleep on the Tube and end up in Epping or Heathrow. And I'd get into unlicensed minicabs in the early hours: all the things we'd tell our daughters not to do."
I ask about one-night stands. "Can we call them romantic liaisons?" she says then laughs. "Well, you're right, they weren't romantic. They were more like flings. I wasn't looking for love. But it's true that I would end up sometimes at a bar and someone would send a drink over, and I'd think, 'Why not?' and we'd go home together. I liked the excitement of not knowing how a night was going to end. It was all very ladette -- work hard, play hard."
That's never as jolly as it sounds in the long run. "I would end up falling off the bar stool and I smoked like a trooper. The only good thing is that I never tried drugs: I knew I was the all-or- nothing kind and was afraid I'd like them too much."
A boyfriend warned her that she was behaving badly while drunk. "I said he was being sexist and misogynist. My response was to attack him rather than think about the truth."
replica rolexShe stopped drinking abruptly in October 2000, "because it wasn't fun any more. I went to AA for a couple of meetings. It was very helpful at first. But I thought I could give it up myself: and I did. Never touched a drop since".
Her background sounds conventionally posh: Marlborough College then Keble, Oxford, where she read theology, but on probing, it's more unsettled. Her elderly father ran a builder's merchants but died in her teens. "I used the money he left me to send myself to Marlborough.
I didn't really fit in with those girls in Alice bands and everyone coming from a house with a long drive."
Her Oxford ghosts returned to haunt her recently when it was alleged she lied on her CV about getting a theology degree when she had left Keble after two years without one. She insists she never lied about her academic rec
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