Should the next Speaker speak? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. It seems obvious that, in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, the ‘first Commoner in the land’ should add his voice to the public conversation. Until now, he has been forbidden by convention from doing so. The favourite for the post, John Bercow, wants to get out there on the media, being, he says annoyingly, ‘a Speaker and a Listener’. But if Mr Speaker Bercow (or whoever) gets lots of invitations to appear on GMTV, he will have to say something, and if he says something, he will be expected to say something interesting, and if he says something interesting, it will be hard to avoid stirring controversy among the MPs towards whom he must be impartial. The oft-repeated doctrine of Mr Speaker Lenthall confronted by the King is that he ‘hath not tongue to utter’ unless the House give him leave. Surely the Speaker should be much more vigorous about his historic role which gives him his title of speaking for the House to the executive. Surely, too, he should have more public discussion with the House about how it runs itself. But if his tongue is uttering all over the airwaves, there will be trouble. Candidates who are less ready to climb on the hustings, such as Frank Field, seem more suitable.
On 18 January 1944, the 69-year-old Winston Churchill travelled overnight by train to London from the coast. He had just returned from two months abroad, during which time he had attended the Tehran Conference and then, in North Africa, contracted pneumonia. Two hours after arriving at Paddington, he was in the House of Commons, without warning. Harold Nicolson recorded the scene: ‘I was idly glancing at my Order Paper when I saw (saw is the word) a gasp of astonishment pass over the faces of the Labour Party opposite.
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