Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since a speaker of the Commons stood down from its high chair with dignity and to applause. Being appointed to the vital role of chief referee is supposed to be the greatest honour and heaviest responsibility that MPs can confer on one of their colleagues. Yet the last person to leave in good standing was Betty Boothroyd, the former Tiller Girl from Yorkshire, who was the first, and so far only, madam speaker to occupy the seat. Her successor, Michael Martin, was engulfed by the parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009 and forced out when MPs were desperately searching for a sacrificial offering to appease the wrath of voters disgusted by parliamentarians fleecing the taxpayer. His successor, John Bercow, was disdained by many of his colleagues as a showboater and loathed by Brexity Conservatives who thought him outrageously biased towards the Remainer cause. Pursued out of the chair by allegations of bullying, Mr Bercow was denied the peerage that is usually automatically conferred on former speakers.
The stars seemed to look more kindly on Sir Lindsay Hoyle, a Labour man, when he was “dragged” to the chair by his sponsors in the traditional fashion four years ago. He had done admired service as deputy speaker, he promised to be an impartial adjudicator of the parliamentary rules and a champion of MPs’ rights, and he was well liked among all parties. Now the position of speaker Hoyle, a warm, fair, decent and diligent character whose overall performance in the chair has been commendable, is suddenly under threat because of his central role in the high dramas and low politics that have gripped parliament over Gaza.
Let’s rewind to Wednesday. If you tuned into the Commons that day, you will have seen speaker Hoyle making a highly contentious ruling that helped Labour out of a jam, but at the high cost to the chair of igniting howling fury from SNP MPs, their anger not entirely synthetic. Conservative MPs, in an opportunistic alliance of convenience with the nationalists, joined the uproar, with the main aim of making Labour look bad. If you stayed tuned, you will then have seen an ashen-faced and visibly shaken speaker reappear in the chair to try to regain his authority by apologising for his convention-busting ruling and saying it had not had the effect that he intended. “Anyone watching sat there in Gaza or Tel Aviv, what will they have made of it?” one Labour figure said to me in the wake of the bawling bedlam that consumed the Commons. Truth to tell, the peoples of Gaza and Israel have more pressing concerns than the unedifying farce performed by British parliamentarians. In terms of influencing either Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or the leaders of Hamas, all that sound and fury in the Commons signified nothing. This wasn’t about trying to bring peace to Gaza. The backstairs manoeuvres, sanctimonious finger-jabbing, pious posturing and ostentatious walk-outs from the chamber were the product of skulduggery and trap-laying at Westminster when a general election is looming. It was into this fetid briar patch that speaker Hoyle became, perhaps fatally, ensnared.
Labour was in a pickle of its own making because of the party’s internal divisions and the shifting sands of its leadership’s position on whether it should be supporting a ceasefire and of what kind. The SNP, which has more cynicism in its veins than it has the milk of human kindness, used one of its “opposition days” to table a motion deliberately worded in a way designed to make Labour’s splits wider. Conniving Tories were keen to see Sir Keir Starmer embarrassed. Speaker Hoyle upended precedent by allowing Labour an amendment, one constructed so that Sir Keir could present his side with a proposition that they could unite around. The Labour leader denies that he put any improper pressure on the speaker, but that has not dispelled the grave allegation that other people on Team Labour told Sir Lindsay that he might struggle to get reinstalled in the chair after the election if he did not see things Labour’s way. This was first reported and attributed to “senior Labour sources” by Nick Watt, the political editor of Newsnight and formerly of the Observer. He is not a journalist who makes things up. It was bad enough that other parties thought that the speaker was bending the rules to do favours for his former comrades. It was worse when accompanied by the accusation that political blackmail was involved.
Close your ears to canting Conservatives, because they don’t have pure motives or clean hands. Tory bombast about the Commons being denied a proper debate on Gaza is total humbug. The government controls the parliamentary timetable. It could have, but hasn’t, scheduled a debate at any time in the past five months. If the prime minister sincerely wants MPs to have a serious discussion about the conflict and the stance Britain should take, Rishi Sunak can tell his business managers to create time for one. He has the power to make it happen this week.
To compound the nauseating phoniness of this affair, there is actually a good deal of cross-party consensus about Gaza. The Conservatives, Labour and the SNP, the three largest groups in the Commons, agree that the conflict needs to be brought to an end. All want the hostages released. All believe that an Israeli ground assault on Rafah will be horrific. All support the negotiation of a two-state solution as the long-term route to peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians. A grownup Commons could coalesce around a unified position that may have a sliver of impact on events - if the parties were motivated by wanting to make a contribution to resolving this conflict rather than engaging in grubby gamesmanship in the pursuit of electoral advantage.
In the explicatory and emotional statement that speaker Hoyle made later in the week, he justified his controversial ruling by saying that his main concern had been for the safety of parliamentarians who might have been at risk if they had been denied the opportunity to vote for the Labour position on a ceasefire. “I never, ever want to go through a situation where I pick up a phone to find a friend, on whatever side, has been murdered by a terrorist. I also do not want another attack on this house.” Safety is not a trivial concern. In recent memory, extremists have murdered two MPs, Labour’s Jo Cox and Sir David Amess of the Conservatives, and taken the life of PC Keith Palmer, a police officer manning the main gate. I found the speaker’s explanation heartfelt. So do many MPs to whom I have spoken. But among others in their ranks it has made his situation more precarious. They say he should not be making and admitting to making rulings under the influence of threats of violence towards MPs. It was dangerous, some argue, to imply that extremists can have an effect on Commons proceedings because it will encourage more attempts to intimidate parliamentarians.
Sir Lindsay has some vocal champions, such as the widely respected Tory Sir Charles Walker, who says he will fight for him “with every fibre and breath in my body”. The speaker’s chances of survival may also be improved by the calculation of ministers that the best way for them to exploit this affair is to depict Sir Lindsay not as the villain, but as the victim of Labour machinations that put him in an impossible position. The worry for him is that his apologies have not appeased those who are out to get him. By close of play on Friday, more than 70 MPs, a combination of SNP and Conservative, had signed a motion expressing no confidence. One senior Tory who has not signed the motion believes: “The speaker’s authority is shot.” If momentum builds against him over the weekend, he will be in deeper trouble. It would not necessarily require a majority no-confidence vote to eject him from the chair. A speaker cannot do the job without the respect of the Commons as a collective. It would likely only take a significant minority - a quarter to a third, say - of MPs to declare that he can’t carry on for it to be the red card for the referee.
That would be an unjust end to what has been, considered in the round, a creditable term in the chair. If he is forced out, that will be the third speakership in a row that has ended badly. MPs would then have to ask what that says about themselves and the way they do their business. Which was squalidly over Gaza.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
