The race for the new deputy speakers
The House of Commons will choose three deputies for Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle on 23 July, but who will they be and what do they do?
With thanks to John Curtis of the Library for a post on Twitter, I note that the three deputy speakers of the House of Commons will be elected on Tuesday 23 July. These figures do a great deal of (often unglamorous) work and rarely get the attention, let alone the credit, that they deserve, and since I used to run their private office many years ago, it seemed as good an opportunity as any to explain briefly who they are and what they do, and who might be in the frame for the jobs.
The origin and functions of the offices
The principal deputy speaker is the Chairman of Ways and Means, an office which dates back to the English Civil War; in the last parliament it was held by Dame Eleanor Laing (Con, Epping Forest). A significant factor contributing to the conflict between Crown and Parliament had been money, and proposals for raising taxation were at that point considered by the Committee of Ways and Means (a similar body still exists in the US House of Representatives and wields considerable power). The committee itself was abolished in 1967 and its responsibility transferred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but those parts of a bill which involve imposing a tax or other charge on the public are still called Ways and Means Resolutions. After 1641, the House decided that the committee should be chaired by a Member other than the Speaker, who was still identified closely with royal authority, and around the end of the 17th century it became the practice to elect the same person as chairman in successive sessions.
Until the middle of the 19th century, there were no formal arrangements for anyone other than the Speaker presiding over sittings of the House. Sometimes a Privy Counsellor might take the chair in the event of absence or illness, but as the Commons began to sit for longer and consider more business, the lack of a stand-in became an obvious lacuna. In 1853, a select committee on the Office of the Speaker recommended that there should be an acknowledged deputy and that the Chairman of Ways and Means should hold the office. The Deputy Speaker Act 1855 made provision for a deputy to have full authority over the House and act “as if the Speaker himself were in the chair”. Henry FitzRoy, Conservative MP for Lewes and a former Home Office minister, was appointed to the new post and held it for the next four years.
The Chairman of Ways and Means, as well as acting as the Speaker’s deputy, has specific responsibilities. He presides over the Court of Referees, which determines the right of petitioners against private bills to be heard, and has broader general responsibility for business relating to private bills; together with the Chairman of Committees, the principal deputy speaker of the House of Lords, he decided in which House private bills will first be considered. Since 1999, he has been responsible for business considered in Westminster Hall, the secondary debating chamber in which matters not subject to formal decisions are considered. In addition, he oversees the Panel of Chairs (formerly the Chairmen’s Panel), a group of senior MPs who preside over public bill committees, delegated legislation committees and, in some cases, Committee of the Whole House.
Prominently, the Chairman of Ways and Means stands in for the Speaker during Budget debates. This is an acknowledgement of the role’s history in defending the financial privileges of the House, but it is only a matter of convention, not procedure: the Speaker is perfectly entitled to preside over these events but the Chairman has done so for centuries.
In 1902, the House decided to appoint a First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means to act as a second deputy speaker and relieve some of the burden on the other two occupants of the chair. The first holder of the office was Arthur Jeffreys, Conservative MP for Basingstoke, a non-practising barrister and former first-class cricketer. In 1971, with the pressure of business continuing to grow, a Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means was added, in the person of Lance Mallalieu (Lab, Brigg).
In the last parliament, Dame Rosie Winterton (Lab, Doncaster Central) was First Deputy Chairman and Nigel Evans (Con, Ribble Valley) was Second Deputy Chairman. Of the three deputy speakers, the Chairman, Dame Eleanor Laing, and the First Deputy Chairman, Dame Rosie Winterton, retired and will go to the House of Lords, while Nigel Evans was defeated in his bid for re-election in Ribble Valley.
The day to day business of the deputy speakers
The Speaker will generally take the chair for the first hour or two of each day’s sitting, excepting sitting Fridays when he is traditionally absent. The House sits from 2.30 pm to 10.30 pm on Mondays, 11.30 am to 7.30 pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 9.30 am to 5.30 pm on Thursdays and 9.30 am to 3.00 pm on Fridays (when it sits). The average day, therefore, is something like eight hours. After the Speaker leaves the chair, the three deputy speakers will preside over business according to a rota drawn up week by week, usually for around 90 minutes at a time. Sometimes the Speaker will come back for another stint later in the day, especially if there is an unexpected level of importance or public interest, or in some cases if tensions in the House are running especially high.
In general, this system works fairly seamlessly: the entering and exiting occupants of the chair will have a very brief handover and the clerks at the Table of the House are on hand to provide advice and briefing as necessary. Indeed, you can often see during debates that MPs do not notice when the occupant of the chair has changed, and will sometimes have to correct their address from “Mr Speaker” to “Madam Deputy Speaker” or whatever the case may be. That is a good sign: to an extent there should be a kind of theological unity to the Speaker and the three deputies, four manifestations of one whole. The deputy speakers attend the Speaker’s conference every day, at which the Clerk of the House and other senior officials will advise on the day’s business, its likely progress and any potential additions or interruptions.
It is worth noting that, like the Speaker, the deputy speakers do not normally vote in divisions, though if occupying the chair would exercise a casting vote in the event of a tie. However, while the Speaker formally leaves his political party and is wholly independent after his election—and is traditionally not opposed at general elections, standing as “The Speaker seeking re-election”—the deputy speakers retain their formal party ties. Of course they will not engage in active partisan behaviour, and must above all retain the confidence of the House in their ability to preside and make rulings impartially. If this sounds like a potentially ambiguous and hazardous situation, all I can say is that I’ve never seen a serious issue arise about a deputy speaker’s impartiality.
The election of the deputy speakers
Before 2010, the deputy speakers were nominated by the Leader of the House and agreed to by MPs, having been arranged between the party whips. In 2009, however, the Procedure Committee published a report which recommended that, as part of a broader programme of renewal and transparency in the wake of the expenses scandal, the Chairman, First Deputy Chairman and Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means should be elected by the whole House on a free vote. In March 2010, Standing Order SO No. 2A was added to the Standing Orders for Public Business, which set out the criteria for election.
The deputy speakers are nominated by single transferable vote, with MPs marking the list of candidates in order of preference. However, this is subject to some strictures which can sound more complicated than they really are: two candidates will be drawn from the opposite side of the House from which the Speaker was drawn—so at the forthcoming election two will be opposition Members, almost certainly Conservatives—of which the candidate gaining more votes will become Chairman of Ways and Means and the other Second Deputy Chairman; one candidate will come from the same side of the House as the Speaker and will be First Deputy Chairman; and the four holders of the offices of Speaker and deputy speakers will include at least one man and one woman (in effect this guarantees a woman will be among the deputy speakers, though as the gender balance of the House becomes more even, it may be a guarantee in the opposite direction).
What that means is that when the House elects new deputy speakers on 23 July, the Chairman of Ways and Means and the Second Deputy Chairman will be Conservative MPs while the First Deputy Chairman will be a Labour MP. Once elected, they serve for the rest of the parliament.
Potential candidates
So who might stand for election for these positions? As noted above, Dame Eleanor Laing and Dame Rosie Winterton both chose to retire, but the defeat of Nigel Evans has greater significance. Evans had been an MP since 1992, and although his majority had never been one of the biggest in the House, it had long been comfortable. Indeed, in the Conservative rout of 1997, he had somehow managed modestly to increase his majority, from 6,542 in 1992 to 6,640. His winning margin peaked in 2019 at 18,439, but on 4 July he was defeated by Labour candidate Maya Ellis by 856 votes. This matters because Evans would have been a strong candidate to resume his position as a deputy speaker and perhaps ascend to Chairman of Ways and Means: he had been First Deputy Chairman from 2010 to 2013, when he had stepped down after being arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault, of which he was acquitted at trial in 2014. In January 2020, he was re-elected as a deputy speaker (but because of the party allocations had to be Second Deputy Chairman rather than his previous post of First Deputy). He had also served on the Panel of Chairs from 2009 to 2010 and from 2015 to 2019, and was a popular and effective occupant of the chair. But that is democracy in action.
One factor to consider is that 335 of the 650 Members of Parliament are newly elected, and therefore have never seen any of the potential candidates at first hand in their professional settings. It is impossible to estimate what effect this will have on the outcome, but it must surely mean that straightforward ability and sure-footedness in the chair, which is in fact the most important quality required of deputy speakers, will be less important than it might otherwise be.
Conservatives
Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) is now the oldest Member of Parliament, at 80, and has served in the House since 1983. Before his election he worked in broadcasting, and has the singular distinction of having been a disc jockey on pirate radio station Radio Caroline North 1964-65. He later worked at the BBC and then Thames Television. Sir Roger never served on the front bench, though he was parliamentary private secretary to junior defence ministers Archie Hamilton and Jeremy Hanley from 1992 to 1994. However, his procedural experience is enormous; he has been on the Panel of Chairs since 1997, and in December 2022 he was appointed as an additional deputy speaker to assist while the Chairman of Ways and Means, Dame Eleanor Laing, was being treated for cancer. He is effectively therefore a incumbent, and from the perspective of experience and ability is by many leagues the most eligible candidate to be Chairman of Ways and Means. I worked with Roger when I was private secretary to the deputy speakers and he was a senior member of the Panel of Chairs, and I like him a great deal. He can sometimes seem slightly gruff and abrupt but I knew I could have complete confidence that he would preside over any form of business with skill and efficiency. If life is fair he will top the ballot.
Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) was elected in 2010, quickly became a government whip and then a minister, and was appointed to the cabinet as Culture, Media and Sport Secretary when Theresa May took office in 2016. In January 2018 she replaced James Brokenshire at the Northern Ireland Office, where she was not really a success; she was criticised by the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee for her tardiness in replying to correspondence, and unwisely admitted that she had been largely unaware of the intricacies of politics in the province before her appointment, not grasping that “people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa”. She was not retained in office by Boris Johnson in 2019. However, since the end of her ministerial career, she has enjoyed a second act as a quietly effective chair of the Procedure Committee since January 2020, overseeing inquiries into important internal issues like remote participation in proceedings during lockdown, proxy voting, arrangements to accommodate babies in the chamber and Westminster Hall and the scrutiny of secretaries of state who are members of the House of Lords. So she is well versed in how the House of Commons operates, and in the chamber she speaks straightforwardly but effectively. Since 2022, Bradley has been the UK co-chair of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, but she is untested in chairing parliamentary debates at Westminster, which would represent a steep learning curve.
Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) was also elected in 2010, though had a slower rise to ministerial office, serving as a junior work and pensions minister (2016-17), at the Cabinet Office (2017-18) and then as immigration minister at the Home Office (2018-19). She was not given office when Boris Johnson became prime minister, and had the Conservative whip suspended from September to October 2019 after voting against the government on Brexit (which she had opposed). In January 2020, she was elected chair of the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee. Having made stinging criticisms of the coalition on planning reform before she became a minister, Nokes has been a “candid friend” of the government since 2020, which has not always endeared her to fellow Conservative MPs. However, she has been a member of the Panel of Chairs since 2019, so has several years’ experience presiding over legislative committees and in Westminster Hall. She is running on a platform of outspokenness and concern for equality and welfare: her fortunes will depend on how fellow MPs weigh ability at the job in question against personal impressions.
Nusrat Ghani (Sussex Weald) was elected to the House of Commons in 2015 after a career encompassing investment banking, charity work and the BBC. She gained ministerial office quickly, as whip and junior transport minister (2018-20), but was dropped by Boris Johnson despite having been touted as a candidate to oversee the High Speed 2 rail project. In 2022, Liz Truss appointed her Minister of State for Science and Investment Security, her brief changing slightly to industry and investment security when Rishi Sunak became prime minister a few weeks later. In March this year she moved to the Foreign Office as Europe minister. Ghani claimed that when she was sacked in 2020 she was told by the then-Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, that it was in part because her Muslim faith made some colleagues uneasy, though Spencer denied this. She has some experience of chairing debates, having served on the Panel of Chairs from 2020 to 2022 between her ministerial stints, but might have to work hard to make an overwhelming case for a deputy speakership. Her pitch focuses on security and the rights of backbenchers.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) missed out on the Conservative nomination for Richmond in 2014 to a young R. Sunak but found a safe Midlands berth succeeding the veteran Sir Richard Shepherd in Aldridge-Brownhills. She became an assistant government whip in 2018 and was rewarded for enthusiastic support for Boris Johnson with a junior ministerial position at the Ministry of Justice, then rapidly transferred to the Foreign Office (where she had worked as an executive officer in 1987-89) as Europe and Americas minister in 2020. She moved to the Department for Transport in December 2021 and was promoted to minister of state a few months later. In September 2022, she was a surprise choice by Liz Truss to be Government Chief Whip; it has been suggested that Truss failed to persuade her friend Thérèse Coffey to accept the job—she became Deputy Prime Minister instead—and chose Morton in something of a panic. Truss quickly took an intense dislike to Morton, at one point complaining “I just don’t want to have her in here, I just hate her”, and during a chaotic Commons vote on fracking the Chief Whip attempted to resign, before seemingly rescinding her resignation. Truss herself resigned a few days later. In November 2022, Morton joined the Backbench Business Committee and in 2023 the Speaker’s Conference on Members’ staff, so she has seen the inner workings of the House from a number of perspectives. The chaos of her brief tenure as Chief Whip will hang over her, however, and there is little reason to think she will be towards the top end of the poll for deputy speaker.
Helen Grant (Maidstone and Malling) was elected in 2010, having briefly (2004-06) been a Labour member and then working with the Centre for Social Justice after a career as a solicitor. She was rapidly promoted to be a junior equalities minister (2012-15) as well as serving at the Ministry of Justice (2012-13) then, as a former under-16 judo champion, becoming Minister of State for Sport and Tourism (2013-15). She returned to the backbenches after the 2015 general election, although she was briefly a vice-chairman of the Conservative Party under Theresa May. Grant has been relatively anonymous for some years now and will struggle to outpoll colleagues.
Labour
Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Gateshead South) was first elected in 2005 having been a trades union official and Labour Party organiser in the North East and London. She was briefly an assistant whip at the end of the last Labour government (2009-10) and served unobtrusively but near-continuously on the opposition front bench under Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman, Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir Starmer: children and families (2010-13), women and equalities (2013-15), children and families again (2015-16), public health (2016-20) and veterans’ affairs (2020-21). In May 2021, Starmer made Hodgson his parliamentary private secretary, supposedly in an attempt to improve relations with Labour MPs from the North of England. She left that post in 2023 and became chair of the House of Commons Finance Committee, in which capacity she was also a member of the House of Commons Commission. Like Bradley, therefore, she has experience of the administration of the House but not of presiding over debates.
Judith Cummins (Bradford South) joined the Commons in 2015 after some years in local government, replacing affable former sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe. She joined the opposition whips’ office within months, then was shadow international trade minister from 2018 to 2020. Sir Keir Starmer did not appoint her to his front bench team, and she had already joined the Panel of Chairs. She was briefly an acting deputy speaker in July 2021, standing in for Dame Rosie Winterton who contracted Covid-19 and was forced to isolate herself. Cummins is a blameless citizen who will certainly attract little active opposition, though she may struggle to promote her candidacy beyond that.
No doubt more candidates will emerge, so I will update this from time to time. It is very hard to predict how a House comprising a majority of newcomers will vote on a role very few of them have observed in much detail. I may offer some predictions as we get closer to the ballot in 12 days’ time, but not just yet…
Dame Karen has, since October 2022, been Co-Chair of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, and has chaired its plenary sittings in Cavan, Belfast, St Helier and Co. Wicklow, alongside her Irish counterpart Brendan Smith TD. So it is not strictly accurate to say she has no experience of chairing debate: and I am sure you would not wish to make light of the challenges inherent in chairing that assembly.
Given your opposition to any change in the electoral system for the House of Commons, I was surprised and amused to learn that the three Deputy Speakers are elected by the Single Transferable Vote (i.e. Proportional Representation). This is the system which is used for local elections in Scotland, Assembly and local elections in Northern Ireland and parliamentary and local elections in the Republic of Ireland. There are additional restrictions (that one must be female and one male, and that two must come from the Opposition side of the House) which makes it virtually identical with the system used for the elections to the Irish Senate. It seems odd to use a proportional system for internal elections in a House which is elected by a notably disproportional system (in the new House the Labour party has 63% of the seats based on 34% of the votes) but that's British logic for you! On the numbers, given that there are now 231 Opposition members (excluding the 7 Sinn Féin members) of which 121 are Conservative and 72 Liberal Democrat, it seems to me that a Liberal Democrat candidate would have a good prospect of being elected, if they secured the support of all their party colleagues at least. Much would depend on how the other 38 Opposition members vote. With 412 members, the Labour Party has far more votes than they require to elect one Deputy Speaker, which is all they can elect. The quota will be 161 [(643/4) rounded up to next whole number] so they will have 251 spare votes and their lower preferences can determine which Opposition candidates are elected, should they choose to exercise them.