“Thank you for being such a good human being,” gurgled Ann Clwyd (Lab, Cynon Valley). “You have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands,” cooed Seema Malhotra (Lab, Feltham & Heston). Richard Harrington (Con, Watford) revealed that his mother kept “a large photograph” of Bercow on her mantelpiece, and would “continually” ask her son: “Why can’t you be like John Bercow?”

Admittedly these MPs did not have access to a time machine. They could not leap two and a half years into the future to read this week’s report by the Independent Expert Panel, which says Bercow displayed “threatening conduct” towards staff.

All the same, they were well aware that allegations of bullying had been made against him – all the way back in spring 2018. We all believe in “innocent until proven guilty”. But it doesn’t mean you have to crawl and gush. Why, then, were MPs so lavishly effusive?

In pondering this mystery, it’s hard not to recall what Labour’s Dame Margaret Beckett had said in October 2018, when an interviewer asked her whether the Speaker should go. Obviously “abuse is terrible”, she conceded. But leaving the EU was “the most difficult decision we have made… in all our lifetimes”. And that, she argued, “trumps bad behaviour”.

As far as I can see, there’s only one way to interpret this. Which is that it was vital to keep Bercow, no matter how he’d treated his staff – because it might help Remainers to foil Brexit.

Eventually, of course, he left, and a few months later, Brexit went ahead. But even after that, some MPs were still willing to make fools of themselves in his name. In 2020, when the Government declined to award Bercow the peerage he so coveted, Labour’s Dawn Butler claimed that this itself was “a form of bullying”.

An intriguing definition of the term. As it happens, the Government has never awarded me a peerage, either. Nor has it awarded one to any of my family, or friends, or neighbours, or for that matter millions of other people. Perhaps the Government is bullying all of us, too.