Lindsay Hoyle has become a menace

The Labour party is not very good at electing prime ministers but it is very good indeed at electing House of Commons Speakers.

Lindsay Hoyle is the fourth in a row to have been a Labour member, though it should be noted that John Bercow was nominally a Tory when he was installed and didn’t formally join the People’s party until after he stood down.

While Bercow took the Speaker’s chair at the behest of many Labour MPs who understood the loathing felt for him by some of his Conservative colleagues, Hoyle attracted substantial Tory backing on the grounds of his supposed common sense ‘old Labour’ Euroscepticism.

Hoyle was thought to be a modest man, perhaps with much to be modest about, as Winston Churchill once cattily observed of Clement Attlee. But at least he would lack Bercow’s self-importance and understand that his role was to ensure orderly debate rather than to become a star or political weather-maker in his own right.

That theory has been in intensive care for a while following Hoyle’s discovery that he rather enjoys the limelight and the sound of his own voice, especially at Prime Minister’s Questions. He has even invented his own PMQs meme, where he will interrupt proceedings to warn that a member harrumphing from a sedentary position may soon be enjoying ‘a cup of tea’ in the Members’ Tea Room, i.e. will get ‘named’ or banished from the Chamber by him.

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While this never actually happens, it does lead to Hoyle frequently cutting off the Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition in their admittedly not very lyrical flows.

When Rishi Sunak made Lord Cameron Foreign Secretary back in November, Hoyle bizarrely acted as if a constitutional crisis had been instigated on account of it preventing MPs from fully scrutinising foreign policy. Yet this was an invented rumpus. One would have thought he’d have recalled the late Lord Carrington fulfilling the same role in the first-term Thatcher administration. And in any event, a team of Foreign Office ministers was always going to be available to take their departmental questions in the elected chamber.

In early January alarm bells really started to ring when the Commons authorities announced that the Palestinian flag would be flown from Parliament to mark Hoyle’s upcoming meeting with the ‘Palestine Ambassador’.

Mysteriously – perhaps after being put right about the perils of acting ultra vires on Middle East matters – the plan for such a meeting and flag-flying ceremony was swiftly shelved. The Speaker’s office claimed that ‘a routine planning email was sent in error’.

And yet now Hoyle has gone full Bercow by ripping up parliamentary precedent in order to allow a Labour party amendment to be voted on during an opposition day debate on Gaza sponsored by another party, the SNP.

This decision, against the advice of the Clerk of the House, no less, recalls Bercow’s outrageous and out-of-the-blue decision to allow opposition MPs intent on thwarting Brexit to take over the Commons order paper.

The move does Keir Starmer a massive favour by allowing his frontbenchers to support Labour’s own amendment rather than having to decide whether to resign to vote for the SNP motion. Starmer had been facing the prospect of several damaging departures from his top team and yet now isn’t.

As the ramifications of another Speaker apparently gone rogue are still being absorbed, it would appear that the Commons now has a presiding authority with the ability levels of Michael Martin (who stood down as Speaker in 2009 when his befuddlements and mis-steps became too embarrassing for MPs to stomach) combined with the ego levels of Bercow.

Some pundits are already predicting he will have to go. No doubt the Labour whips office already has a plan to procure an amenable replacement should it come to that.