John Bercow has been a necessary defender of Parliament

John Bercow’s decision not to stand for re-election will bring some satisfaction to Brexiteers after several miserable weeks. The Speaker has been nakedly partisan, personally spiteful in the chair and done more to resist Brexit than the entire Labour Party put together. Many Tories consider him a jumped-up little twerp with an over-inflated sense of his constitutional significance but he is their jumped-up little twerp, one who entered Parliament by pandering to hard-right prejudices and whom backbench Tories rallied behind in 2015 when the Coalition government tried to get rid of him.

Then Leader of the House William Hague concocted a plot to oust Bercow by introducing a secret ballot for electing a Speaker in the next Parliament. Amid much schoolboy sentiment, Tory MPs rose to declaim this sharp practice and keep Bercow in post. What kind of weak-kneed TRG wet would do such a thing? Well, for starters, one who scolded the retiring Hague ‘that his career should end with his name being put to a bit of parliamentary jiggery-pokery that has come about, representing grudges that some people have against Mr Speaker’.