J OHN BERCOW has long enjoyed a scrap. As a bullied child, he is reported to have mocked bigger, dimmer pupils by reciting their reading mistakes back to them. As a Conservative MP , he criticised all parties, including his own. As speaker of the House of Commons since 2009, he has used the seat’s power to help Parliament hold the government to account—much to the executive’s annoyance and his enjoyment.

He won a lot credit of for this, as well as for modernising Parliament (running outreach schemes and even turning a Commons bar into a nursery to support working parents). But it is alleged that Mr Bercow treated parliamentary staff with contempt. When accusations of bullying in Parliament—including by Mr Bercow, which he denies—reached the press earlier this year, the leader of the House of Commons ordered an inquiry by Dame Laura Cox, a retired High Court judge. It published its findings on October 15th.

The report is damning. The House of Commons, it says, is characterised by “a culture, cascading from the top down, of deference, subservience, acquiescence and silence”. There is a “clear lack of accountability” and a “general unwillingness to challenge things robustly”. Some at the top of the hierarchy take advantage, with senior staff humiliating juniors and MP s treating staff “like servants”. Women complain of being groped, while groups of male MP s are said to become “increasingly boorish” when together, making “frequent sexual innuendos, lewd comments or sexual gestures”. All in all, Parliament is “a stark reminder of how bad things used to be.”

The report, admirable in its thoroughness, does not deal with individual accusations. Instead it seeks to change the culture of the House and proposes that an independent system be set up to handle complaints. In doing so, it follows the advice of experts in how to deal with workplace malpractice: the job is not just to throw out bad apples, but to uproot the system that enables their actions. Dame Laura writes that it is “difficult to envisage how the necessary changes can be successfully delivered …under the current senior House administration.” That includes Mr Bercow. He has let it be known that he plans to go next summer, after Brexit, but seems determined to resist leaving before then.

If he manages to cling on for that long, it will be for political reasons. The speaker is in charge of proceedings in the House of Commons and can influence matters by, for instance, choosing whether to allow opposition amendments to government bills. The office is supposed to be politically neutral. But when it comes to Brexit, Mr Bercow is widely believed to favour Remain (a “Bollocks to Brexit” sign spotted in his car provides a clue). Margaret Beckett, a former foreign secretary, explained why many Labour MP s have so far defended Mr Bercow, in spite of the allegations against him: “Yes, if it comes to it, the constitutional future of this country, the most difficult decision we’ve made for hundreds of years, yes, it trumps bad behaviour.”

Whatever the ethics of that position (and the merits of “bad behaviour” as a description of the abuses that Mr Bercow failed to stop), the trade-off may not be quite as Ms Beckett imagines it. In the event of a failure to reach a deal with the European Union, the idea that Mr Bercow would enable amendments to, say, introduce a second referendum is “unrealistically optimistic”, says Hannah White of the Institute for Government, a think-tank. Amending the withdrawal bill may be easier if a deal is reached. But if anti-Brexit MP s have the numbers to change the course of Brexit, they also have the power to elect a supportive speaker. And by convention, the next one is due to be a Labour MP .