Another one thrown under the bus

Poor Mr Speaker Hoyle has become the latest victim of the curse of Starmer.

Wednesday's fiasco of an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons was sparked by Labour Leader, Sir Keir Starmer's maladroit attempt to nobble the Speaker of the House by turning up unexpectedly at a pre-scheduled meeting with a party colleague in order to 'persuade' Sir Lindsay to call a Labour motion on an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza first.

Under the arcane procedures of the House of Commons, Opposition parties have twenty opportunities in a Parliamentary sitting to control the Order Paper, in other words set the agenda for debate. In the effectively two-party set-up that existed prior to the rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) this meant Labour had plenty of scope to challenge the government - and for challenge read embarrass, the point of an Opposition Day Motion being to show the government in the worst possible light.

On this occasion that opportunity fell to the SNP as the third largest bloc in the Commons. As they had done last November, they chose to table a motion for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire in the Gaza conflict. The other two main parties tabled amendments but convention dictated that the SNP's version should be debated first. Having suffered a major revolt over the issue in November, when 56 of his MPs, including 10 frontbenchers, defied him to back an SNP motion urging an immediate ceasefire, Starmer's intervention is understandable, if not forgiveable. However, convincing Hoyle to call all three parties' contributions for debate, with Labour's being called first because its wording was considered more advantageous than the SNP's, was bound to cause a backlash. Unfortunately for the hapless Sir Lindsay, when the inevitable happened,  it rebounded on him.

The reaction of SNP Leader, Stephen Flynn, could best be summed up in the classic Scots phrase 'pure black affronted' and he didn't hold back in expressing his scorn for the Speaker before furiously leading his troops out of the Commons Chamber. But the Conservative Leader of the House, Penny Mordaunt, wasn't best pleased either. Had she had her Coronation Sword of State with her doubtless she would have brandished it like a warrior queen, a veritable latterday Boudica on the warpath. But, then, she is a woman on manoeuvres in more ways than one. The only player left satisfied was Starmer, but at what a cost to a decent, kind and honourable colleague? I hope he thinks it was worth it (he probably does).

Having left his deputy to conduct the business, Hoyle eventually came to the Chamber to face the music. Visibly shaken and crestfallen by the furore his capitulation to Starmer's coercion had caused, he apologised and explained - two things his controversial and widely-loathed predecessor in the chair, John Bercow, had never done. Struggling to control his emotions he acknowledged his error and explained that his decision had been taken to allow the fullest possible debate and to safeguard MPs from the public backlash that had followed November's debate on the same subject. Sadly, it looked and felt as if he'd been leant on and his heartfelt mea culpa did little to allay MPs' anger and discontent. Their trust in his impartiality will not be easily, if ever, regained.

Although Mordaunt subsequently turned her ire away from him onto the real villain of the piece, Starmer, Flynn demanded Hoyle's resignation. But, then, he would, wouldn't he? As leader of the SNP in Westminster his raison d'être is to undermine the Westminster system of government in the eyes of the Scottish electorate. He knows the SNP is likely to lose many of its seats to a resurgent Labour Party in Scotland at the general election so the loss, or diminution, of a respected Westminster figure, the Speaker, is for him, as apparently for Starmer too, merely collateral damage.

Labour has finally, belatedly, shifted its position to call for "an immediate humanitarian ceasefire", following months of pressure from backbenchers and activists, but the price to British Parliamentary democracy has been immense and incalculable. The whole grubby and unedifying debacle, bad even by recent Westminster standards, is made worse by its pretext being so tragic and of such grave humanitarian import. 

It has been said that Hoyle is too nice a man to be Speaker of the House of Commons. It has also been suggested that Wednesday's unseemly brouhaha actually showed that Westminster Parliamentary conventions serve a purpose, which one departs from at one's peril.

Sir Lindsay's fate may yet prove the brutal truth of that.

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