It’s D-day for Lindsay Hoyle as he battles to save his job. The Speaker of the House got into hot water with the SNP last Wednesday after kiboshing their attempts to force Labour into a bind on a Gaza ceasefire. Stephen Flynn, the nationalists’ Westminster leader, is now pushing for Hoyle to today grant a fresh vote on the Middle East crisis. Labour are, understandably, less keen on the idea, with the Starmer army keen to brush over the negotiating tactics they used with the Speaker last week.
So it must have been to their chagrin then that Chris Byrant popped up on Channel 4 News last night to gleefully spill the beans on the whole enterprise. While there to ostensibly plug his latest book, the shadow culture minister chose to opine gravely about how the Commons ‘brought ourselves terribly into disrepute, I think, on Wednesday’, before admitting that, er, he was partly ‘put up’ by Labour to filibuster on the floor of the House to ensure that negotiations with Hoyle could keep going.
Bryant subsequently solemnly intoned that ‘the whole day was grubby and we need a system which doesn’t allow people to manipulate the rules to be able to get what they want.’ ‘Which you did’ retorted host Cathy Newman as Bryant smirked in the chair. One man’s heroic filibuster is another’s broken politics…
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