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The New Speaker

25 June 2009

On Monday this week, I had the chance to play a very small part in electing a new Speaker for the House of Commons. It was by far the oddest election I've ever voted in.

For a start, some of the candidates didn't campaign. Not because they couldn't, but because they thought they shouldn't. Apparently MPs should be able to make up their own minds and it isn't dignified to persuade them one way or the other. I don't know why voting for a Speaker should be any different from every other election in the world, but that's what they thought.

And, rightly, it was a free vote rather than the usual 'Party line' system. There were lots of rumours in the press about different Party whips trying to sway the vote one way or another but, if they did, none of them approached me. That meant every MP had to make up their own mind, so the chamber was packed on Monday as each of the candidates rose in turn to make their pitch.

Ann Widdecombe was magnificent as ever, but she's retiring at the next election and many MPs doubted she could get desperately-needed reforms through in time. Margaret Beckett was pretty good too, but she's been a long-serving Cabinet Minister and the Speaker is traditionally supposed to represent backbenchers instead. Two of the current Deputy Speakers, Alan Haselhurst and Michael Lord, were both class acts as well.

In the end, it came down to John Bercow and George Young. They're both moral, decent people, and good company too. John is small, young and energetic. George is tall, imposing and patrician. In the end, John Bercow won by a handsome margin and now has the toughest job in politics: to show the world that Parliament understands what has gone wrong and to fix it by modernising. Fast.