John Bercow may have gone but his successor is faring little better with the government. Relations between No. 10 and Lindsay Hoyle have been decidedly frosty in recent months, thanks in part to the Speaker’s mounting irritation with ministers continually making announcements to the press before Parliament. Now the row over Owen Paterson and the humiliating u-turn over the standards committee has only made things worse, with Hoyle clearly angry at the way in which Parliament has been dragged into an avoidable sleaze scandal.
Today that frustration was for all to see when the Speaker issued not one, but two, magisterial putdowns to Boris Johnson. As the latter sought to duck Keir Starmer’s questions on the Paterson scandal, Hoyle intervened to stop Johnson from turning Prime Minister’s Questions into, err, Leader of the Opposition Questions. The Speaker remarked cuttingly that ‘We play by the rules, don’t we?’ – to the evident delight of cheering Labour MPs. A
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