Sally forth again

IF there are disapproving mutterings about Sally Bercow having her third stab at fly-onthe- wall TV, she insists they won’t come from her husband. The controversial Speaker’s wife, whose spouse John initially had misgivings about her stint in Celebrity Big Brother, said he was 100 per cent behind her latest venture.

“Oh he was very supportive,” she declares from her apartment home within the Palace of Westminster, where she occasionally breaks off from our chat to deal with interruptions from her children.

“I mean, I don’t assess and analyse his work and he doesn’t analyse mine. I just said, ’Honey, I’m off doing this. I’ve got the childcare sorted’ and he said, ’OK, that’s fine’. I’m very lucky. He’s incredibly supportive, my husband. He wasn’t happy about Celebrity Big Brother, but I know now John is very proud and thinks it was all a storm in a teacup.”

The mother-of-three drew strong criticism for her 2011 appearance in the famous Big Brother house, from which she was the first person to be evicted. But, from her point of view, it resulted in £100,000 for her chosen charity, and an unlikely friendship with the show’s winner, Paddy Doherty.

“I think there’s a lot of snobbishness about reality television. I have absolutely no regrets about doing Celebrity Big Brother,” she says.

Indeed, she got on so well with Big Fat Gypsy Weddings star Doherty that they have teamed up for their second TV series together, Paddy and Sally’s Excellent Gypsy Adventure.

In the four-part show, the pair visit traveller communities in Ireland, Hungary, Spain and Malaysia and explore the local customs. Bercow, who had “such a blast” filming the show, found the experience eye-opening.

“In Spain, they are very much part of mainstream culture. They’re not segregated and ostracised.

I met gypsies who are architects and doctors and who go to university and have more opportunities because they’ve been through the education system. That was quite heartening.”

THE experience also brought her closer to Doherty, who she insists is one of her “absolute best friends”.

“We speak on the phone at least once a fortnight,”

she says.

“I’ve taken my kids up to see him. He’s been down here to see me. I am taking the kids up there again at half term so it’s great. They love him.”

She thinks it’s their differences that make them click so well.

“Our backgrounds are very different. He lives in a traveller site, I live in a royal palace. He left school at ten, I went to Oxford University. But we’ve got a lot in common in the sense that we both say it how we see it.

“I think we both feel a bit like outsiders in our communities. I feel like a fish out of water here in Westminster. And Paddy being a traveller feels outside mainstream society. We’re both slightly rebellious and both very outspoken.”

Indeed, the 42-year-old is rarely far from the headlines.

Last year, she raised eyebrows when she was photographed wearing only a bed sheet for an interview in which she gave such choice quotes as: “I never realised how sexy I would find living under Big Ben with the bells chiming.”

She has also spoken about her issues with alcohol in the past, revealing that in her twenties, she’d easily get through two bottles of wine a day.

“Oh, I’ve made so many mistakes that if I spent all my time analysing them and regretting, I’d probably want to jump off a cliff,” she says, cheerfully.

Bercow is also a keen user of Twitter, and has found herself in hot water over some of her comments, including her admission this year that she was tempted to try legal high methoxetamine and her reference to revellers during the diamond jubilee as “flag-waving loons”.

But she has no plans to censor herself.

“The one thing I’ve fallen into the trap of really is that irony doesn’t come across on Twitter. A lot of my tweets are ironic and tongue-in-cheek and I think people don’t get that.

“All my dark days are out there in the public domain so I don’t need to fret about it.”

•  Paddy and Sally’s Excellent Gypsy Adventure begins on Channel 5 on Wednesday, 10pm