Speaker Bercow: Corbyn will need to stick with new PMQs tone for months

John Bercow has long made clear that he would like MPs to behave a little better at Prime Minister’s Questions, which he believes is so rowdy that it upsets voters. Well, he seems to have got what he wants, or at least for the first week of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. Last night, at a lecture to the think tank Policy Exchange, he was asked about the session, and whether he thought it would improve permanently.

The Speaker said he didn’t believe ‘that a huge amount of additional work is required in terms of creative construction of the session’, though he added that the session could be longer, or have a mix of open and substantive questions from MPs, if they wanted that. But he argued that the tone of the session would only change and the public would only notice that change of tone if everyone involved stuck with that for months.