It’s the photo. If it weren’t for the photo, I’m convinced, John Bercow—former speaker of the United Kingdom’s House of Commons—would never have gotten as far as he has on the second season of the American reality competition The Traitors. In the castle breakfast room where the contestants on Peacock’s addictive series are given the day’s briefing by their fabulously kitted-out host, Alan Cumming, there’s a wall of photos of the 22 competitors. Most of the photos, supplied as they are by the teams managing the reality-show pros who make up the majority of The Traitors’ roster, are glam, well-airbrushed headshots taken at flattering angles, featuring beautiful hair and well-capped teeth.
Not John’s! His photo was clearly taken on someone’s phone, possibly his own. He stares straight into the camera, gray hair mussed, front teeth at a rakish angle to each other. He grins like a doofus. “He looks so fun!” his fellow contestant Phaedra Parks said in Episode 1, beholding John’s headshot. John, who everyone agrees is so fun, the “faithful of the faithfuls,” has flown under the radar for most of the season. But in the past few episodes, his politician’s ruthlessness has been revealed—and he’s about to either become the show’s power player or get the ax. Either way, he’s become The Traitors’ most entertaining character, one whom the other contestants have underestimated at their peril.
That the conventional wisdom on John hardened instantly into universal agreement that he’s harmless is a little shocking, given his pedigree: As a career politician who spent years in the trenches of the U.K.’s Conservative Party, he’s no stranger to starring in a reality show of sorts. (The man served as a member of Parliament for more than two decades.) Who is less trustworthy than a politician?! As he said when introducing himself to viewers: “Backstabbing, deception, it’s all part and parcel of the political life.”
One London friend told me that if he’d starred on the British version of The Traitors, John would have instantly been pegged as a traitor by every contestant, given the low regard with which Brits view even the most affable of their politicians. But the mostly American cast of this edition found him charming, goofy, and innocuous from the start. He has an accent! He’s short! He’s 10 to 20 years older than everyone else! His contribution to the show’s first challenge consisted of falling on his ass and then dogpaddling ineffectually around a lake! What was there to fear?
The contestants might have been warier had they understood what an outsize figure the undersized Bercow cut in the House of Commons, where he was the first Jewish speaker in the body’s history, and ended up serving 10 years in the position—longer than anyone since World War II. To non-politics-caring Brits, he’s mostly known for shouting “Order!,” which he reprised to general merriment on the first night in the Traitors castle. But his actual political career and his personal life are fascinating. A member of an anti-immigrant political pressure group at 18 (a decision he later described as “the most shameful I have ever made”), he joined Parliament as a Conservative but frequently bucked his party, particularly on issues of gay rights. His wife Sally, famously, was an outspoken supporter of the Labour Party, and annoyed Bercow’s colleagues with her criticism of Tories. (She also appeared on Celebrity Big Brother.)
Named speaker in 2009, Bercow gave up his Conservative membership—those who hold the office are expected to be politically neutral—and found himself increasingly at odds with the party’s leaders. “Governments want a passive Speaker who will diplomatically stand aside and leave them to call the shots,” he writes in his heroically boring autobiography, Unspeakable. “I never had the slightest interest in playing that role.” When he gave up his office in the tumultuous summer of 2019, he was not offered the peerage traditionally granted to former speakers, leaving him seemingly at loose ends. He defected to Labour in 2021, only to be ejected in 2022 after an investigation into office bullying. He claims he’s blameless; the parliamentary commissioner for standards, meanwhile, upheld 21 separate allegations of workplace misbehavior. In a formal reprimand, he was told he “should never be permitted a pass to the parliamentary estate.”
So that might explain why he’s on The Traitors. And, given the gift of a new environment where no one knew anything about him, and where everyone assumed immediately that he was a great guy, he’s taken full advantage. John flew under the radar for the first half of the season, referred to offhandedly by contestant after contestant as someone so obviously a faithful that he was barely worth discussing. He joined the group of confidants—known as “Peter’s Pals”—led by former Bachelor Peter Weber, all of whom declared their trust that none of them were traitors. (As it turned out, they were all telling the truth.)
It’s as that group has flexed its muscle that John has suddenly stepped into the forefront. As befits a parliamentarian, he has shined at the end-of-day roundtables where debates are hashed out and votes for banishment taken. In an environment of himbos and Housewives whose own speeches tend toward the nonsensically muddled, John’s memorable turns of phrase stand out. He loves alliteration—he called traitor Dan Gheesling a “silent slaughterer”—and he loves to hold the floor. “Treachery deserves to be punished by banishment,” he declared to Dan in Episode 6. “Banishment, my dear friend, should be your fate tonight.”
In Episode 8, John made the move of the season, and staked his claim as the show’s big dog—just as his pal Peter’s influence began to falter. Onetime Survivor mastermind Parvati Shallow, fearing banishment, was desperate to find suckers she could convince she was not a traitor. (She was.) She targeted hapless, harmless John. “If I can put on a killer performance and convince John I’m a faithful, that might be just enough to take suspicion off me,” she speculated.
In a private conversation, Parvati turned on the waterworks. John acted sympathetic. “Of all the people I’ve met in this game,” he told her, “nobody reveals and displays greater guts and character than you do”—a classic politician’s hedge, complimenting someone without actually saying whether you believe them. Parvati crowed in a confessional: “Maybe I have a new career in acting!”
But at that night’s roundtable, John dropped the hammer. He hadn’t been fooled. “I feel,” he said, drawing his conclusion out deliciously, “that Parvati could well be a duchess of deception and a mistress of murder.” Cut to Parvati, shocked, shocked. A few minutes later, she was voted out, and another traitor was banished.
Thanks to some canny editing, this Thursday’s episode will resolve not one cliffhanger but two—not just who will be banished next, but whether John truly is the new king of the castle. The previous episode ended at the roundtable, at which John, in his longest stemwinder yet, framed the evening’s vote as pivotal—“almost certainly a turning point after which there is no realistic prospect of turning back.” He laid out his case that “fly-low Phaedra” is a traitor. (Once again, he’s right.) “Now is not the time to sit on the fence,” he exhorted his fellow contestants. “We have to confront and defeat the enemy.”
Phaedra no longer thought John seemed fun. She thought, too late perhaps, that he seemed like a politician, and that she should have paid closer attention to him. “This is not Parliament,” she said. “You could bring it down a notch.” The episode ended with the banishment vote tied, 4–4, between Phaedra and Peter, and with one contestant, MJ Javid from Shahs of Sunset, still to weigh in.
So what will happen? If MJ voted for Peter, John’s under no misconceptions about what happens next. After weeks of lying low, he’s finally revealed himself as a threat, and that carries risk. “If my attempt to banish you tonight is unsuccessful, I won’t be here tomorrow,” he told Phaedra. But if MJ casts her deciding vote for Phaedra, it will have been John who convinced her to do it. And it will be John in the driver’s seat—or, you might call it, the speaker’s chair.
