Question, Mr Speaker
There has been much furore recently over the role of the Speaker, but we need to understand what he can and can't do
I need to start with a caveat: I became an implacable detractor of the last Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, and by the end of his tenure I thought he had become hugely damaging to his role and to Parliament. I explained why at length in The Critic last autumn, but I had said at the beginning of the parliamentary wrangling over Brexit that he was self-obsessed, that he had left huge problems for his successor, and I was pleased and vindicated when he was branded a “serial bully” by the Commons’s Independent Expert Panel.
Let me be as clear as I can on that last point: I know some of those whom he bullied, had at least second-hand knowledge of his dreadful conduct and had no reason whatever to doubt what my friends reported to be true. Indeed, everything I knew about Bercow led me to think they were entirely accurate. He is a boastful, arrogant, self-righteous man—let us not forget he rejected not only the verdict but the whole process by which he was condemned and is unrepentant—and came to treat House of Commons officials with (needless) suspicion, hostility and contempt. He is not, however he can fleetingly appear, a nice man.
I should also register that I know, like and respect the incumbent, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. I was his private secretary when he was Chairman of Ways and Means (the senior deputy speaker) and I found him kind, often unexpectedly so, amenable to advice, dutiful in his office and politically acute. He loves the House of Commons and is very aware of his place in its hierarchy but also its history, and I think he has been a very good speaker so far. I hope he will continue to serve for a good while yet.
This is not, however tempting, a rehashed hatched job on the loathsome Bercow. Instead I want to make some clarifying remarks on what the speaker is there to do, and, by doing so, to address some of the criticisms which have been levelled at his successor over the past two and a half years.
Regular sound broadcasting of the House of Commons began on Monday 3 April 1978. It made famous the South Wales tones of the then-speaker, George Thomas, and that parliamentary catchphrase “Order, Order.” (Thomas, incidentally, was born in Port Talbot, an important hub of mellifluous voices as the home of Richard Burton, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen.) Television followed on 21 November 1989, when the sainted Bernard Weatherill was in the chair, and the first full speech broadcast, ironically by a staunch opponent of the innovation, was Ian Gow’s superb moving of the Humble Address after the State Opening of Parliament.
It is nearly 45 years, then, since the Speaker became something of a media personality. During that time, incomparably the best occupant has been Weatherill, a diligent and modest man with a firm grasp of procedure and a disarming manner with outraged or unruly MPs: his farewell speech was a touching masterclass in departure at the right time. The most celebrated, however, was unquestionably the formidable Betty Boothroyd, the first woman to hold the office, who still makes a contribution to public life from the crossbenches of the House of Lords. Her brisk, no-nonsense style during eight years in the chair struck a chord with the public, along with the breezy call of “Time’s up!” at the end of each section of business. She took no prisoners, but made few if any lasting enemies.
What does the speaker do? Everything thinks they know. He chairs debates in the Commons and keeps order. William Lenthall (Speaker 1640-53, 1654-55, 1659, 1659-60) is quoted often to exhaustion, but it is worth examining what he said to Charles I when the king entered the chamber on 4 January 1642 in an attempt to arrest five troublesome MPs. Charles looked for the Five Members, who had been tipped off and made themselves scarce, then asked Lenthall, as Speaker, where they were.
May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg your majesty's pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.
Lenthall was an otherwise rather undistinguished presiding officer, cautious and conservative, but these words were brave, stubborn and prophetic. He had arisen from a tradition of speakers serving as the monarch’s “nark” in the Commons, and many of his predecessors had fallen from grace, some as far as the scaffold. But on that one day in the 17th century he articulated the best job description any speaker could have.
This is important. The Speaker is the servant of the House. Recently, other outward-looking, more ambassadorial roles have emerged and been embraced (I looked at an aspect of this in a previous essay), and they are admirable and helpful in their own ways, but at its core the job is to preside over the House and ensure that the House’s own rules are followed and, by and large, precedent observed.
It’s worth making a point here. When I was a clerk, it was quite common for Members to approach me and complain about the Standing Orders or some other rule or convention which prevented them doing whatever they wanted to do. My job, which i hope I usually managed, was to help the MP find a way to achieve his or her end within those constraints: “You can’t do this but what about trying that?” In truth it was usually quite easy to find a way to satisfy them, as they (rightly) were focusing on outcome rather than process (very much the clerkly bailiwick).
However, some Members grumbled about these rules. I sometimes had to explain that these were not clerks’ contrivances, elaborate regulations to annoy and frustrate our elected representatives: these were the strictures for which the House had itself voted. the Standing Orders, for example, while drafted by clerks, are only effective if adopted by the Commons, while precedent represents centuries of decisions make by MPs. Too often, I think, MPs cannot see themselves as part of a collective body, but as frustrated operators of a system over which they have no control. It is not true.
This is the important point, however. The Speaker, when he makes decisions, is not winging it or following his whims. He is abiding by and interpreting rules and decisions laid down days, months, years or centuries before his tenure. There is scope to exercise judgement, of course, and he can ask for advice from the clerks (though he is in no way bound to accept it). But he is by no means a free agent, and Bercow’s swashbuckling and showboating style has, I fear, encouraged outsiders to regard the Speaker as a master of the House, rather than its servant.
The issue which has come to represent this recently, in my view, has been repeated denunciations of ministers—let us be frank, chiefly the former prime minister Boris Johnson—for lying to the House. “Why does the Speaker let him lie?” “Why doesn’t he get called out on it?” “A strong Speaker would force him to tell the truth!” These are heartfelt and often understandable emotions, but I submit they are neither realistic nor desirable.
A word about lying. It is often commented nowadays that an MP can lie to the House with impunity but another MP may not accuse him or her in the chamber of doing so. This goes to the heart of parliamentary language. Erskine May, the handbook of procedure for Parliament, is often quoted: “Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language.” More specifically, however, it is made very clear that MPs cannot accuse each other of lying. The rules speak of “the imputation of false or unavowed motives,” and a Member who does this will find him or herself stopped by the Speaker, asked to withdraw or moderate the remarks, and, if irreconcilable, ejected from the chamber. Ian Blackford, the leader of the Scottish National Party’s Westminster group, suffered this fate recently when he would not withdraw his remarks that Johnson had lied to Parliament.
As I explained in a recent essay, I think the courtesies of the House are valuable. If MPs could throw around accusations of bad faith without any check, proceedings would very quickly decline into a slanging match of claim and counter-claim, and the atmosphere, sometimes febrile, would become rancorous. What is said in the House may be said through gritted teeth, but the point is that it is said at all. If someone really thinks a falsehood has been perpetrated, it is open to them to table a formal motion to that effect, and the advice of the Speaker on redress can be sought at any time.
This leads me on to two points. The first is that, according to the rules, MPs cannot lie knowingly. Again, Erskine May could not be clearer: “The Commons may treat the making of a deliberately misleading statement as a contempt.” It is sometimes forgotten that John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War whose resignation in 1963 symptomised the decline of the Conservative government under Harold Macmillan, quit not because he was a Service minister connected improperly to a Soviet official but because, when he made a personal statement to the House in the wake of the scandal, he lied and said that there was no “impropriety” in his (in fact sexual) relationship with the young Christine Keeler.
(I find some grim amusement in the private and public reactions of senior Members to the Profumo affair. Iain Macleod, then Leader of the House, asked Profumo bluntly in a private interview, “Look, Jack, the question is: did you fuck her or not?” Nigel Birch, a senior but embittered Conservative backbencher, told the House in the wake of Profumo’s statement, “We know a deal more now about Profumo than we did at the time of the statement, but we have all known him pretty well for a number of years in this House. I must say that he never struck me as a man at all like a cloistered monk; and Miss Keeler was a professional prostitute.” Lord Hailsham, as brilliant as he was unpredictable, reached breaking point during a television interview on the BBC and exploded: “a great party is not to be brought down because of a squalid affair between a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar!”)
If a Member is felt to have told a lie in the House, and done so intentionally, the issue can be referred to the Committee of Privileges. Those who bewail Boris Johnson’s mendacity should at least be reminded that the committee is currently undertaking an inquiry into the former premier, to examine whether he was truthful in the House when he described activities in Downing Street during the pandemic lockdown and his adherence to the rules on social contact. (The motion to refer was approved by the House and the leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, laid out the charges with the clarity of a senior KC and former director of public prosecutions.)
Critics will argue that the process is slow (partially true), cumbersome (perhaps) and open to partisan influence (it is true that the Committee of Privileges, while chaired by an Opposition MP, will always have a government majority, like any select committee). However, the alternative is not particularly clear, to which I will return in a moment.
The second point is that “lying” is a broad charge. We all know what it means, and we all know a lie when we hear it. But its opposite, the truth, is not the only alternative, and between those two poles lie the essential heart of politics. During the Arms to Iraq affair in the mid-1990s, the truthfulness of several senior ministers was called into question. An inquiry led by Lord Justice Scott, which began in 1992 and reported in 1996, concluded that ministers had at the very least failed to inform the Commons of important changes to export regulations, and had not exercised full candour in their dealings with Parliament. An anonymous Ministry of Defence official sighed at one point during the scandal “The truth is a difficult concept.” But, despite a four-year judge-led inquiry, there was no unanimous agreement on whether ministers had “lied” to Parliament.
(The debate on the Scott Report was a huge parliamentary event. The government’s case was led by the President of the Board of Trade, the smooth ex-Footlights Ian Lang, while the pugnacious and eloquent Robin Cook, given two hours to read the report’s 1,000,000 words, gave a bravura performance which sealed his reputation as the best orator in the House. For those with stamina, the BBC’s full coverage of the debate is still available, and worth a watch. Cook is masterful, but on reflection Lang performs more than adequately with a thin case for a crumbling government.)
What ministers say in the House of Commons should be true. It may not always be illuminating, and it is often fearsomely spun. This is not new: the Blair government represented perhaps the apogee of putting a gloss on public pronouncement and often made the same announcement several times, leading to the impression that it was more dynamic than it was. There are many occasions on which a minister may say something that is open to multiple interpretations, the best of which is perhaps not the most accurate, but that does not ipso facto amount to lying.
So we come back to the role of the speaker. “Why doesn’t he call out ministers when they lie?” Well, how exactly would the occupant of the chair (remember there is a rota of four, Mr Speaker and three deputies) do that? Clearly an exhaustive and letter-accurate knowledge of every government statement is impossible, so how is the Speaker supposed to hear an answer or statement a minister makes and decide, in an instant, that it is not only untruthful but clearly and intentionally so? How would he stop the minister and in what terms would he demand a retraction, apology and clarification? It is, as far as I can see, a practical impossibility.
In any event, this misrepresents the Speaker’s role. He is not a public guardian of truth, and is required to uphold the rules of order within the chamber. He cannot look beyond events in front of him, or comment on the implications of what ministers may or may not say. His is a referee, certainly, but he is not a VAR, able to use technology to make precise and measurable adjudications after the fact.
Let us go further. Imagine, somehow, the Speaker took this task upon himself. A minister uttered a contestable statement from the despatch box, the Speaker rose and challenged it on grounds of truth. The minister might seek to argue back, and will undoubtedly and inevitably be more comprehensively briefed. Does the Speaker enter into a debate on content and policy, or back down? Either is deeply inadvisable. And each runs the risk of not dragging the Speaker into partisan controversy so much as having him jump in with both feet.
This matters. The Speaker, whatever other qualities he may have, must be pristinely impartial and trusted as such by Members. On taking office, the speaker renounces his or her former party allegiance, takes no part in divisions (save in a tie), absents himself from the gossipy corners of the House like the Tea Room, and becomes, like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. It was a failure in this regard, during debates on Brexit, that made a major contribution to John Bercow’s fall from grace; he was believed (rightly) to be a Remainer but, more importantly, felt to be allowing that opinion to influence his conduct in the chair. That was unacceptable, and fatal.
Objective truth is a more elusive, contested and important concept than ever in our political discourse. An industry of fact checkers has grown up, fuelled massively by former president Donald Trump’s reckless abuse of language and honesty, and 2 April (appropriately) has even been designated International Fact Checking Day. Like almost any reasonable person, I imagine, I mourn this trend and I think disregard for truth is corrosive and cheapening to public discourse. It would be marvellous if MPs still regarded lying in the House of Commons as an almost-unimaginable sin, on all sides, and were scrupulous to ensure not only that they did not mislead Members but also that their remarks could not easily be subject to misinterpretation. But that is not the world in which we live.
If we expect the Speaker of the House to be a fact-checking machine, ruling on whether what MPs say conforms to some Platonic ideal of clarity and truthfulness, we do two things. We encourage the Speaker to involve himself in partisan arguments about emphasis and spin, which would undermine his authority fatally, and, perhaps worse, we set him up for inevitable failure, as his decisions will never satisfy every part of the spectrum. Setting up the Speaker for failure would be a huge blow to the Commons and would be another cut in the body of trust in public institutions.
I could write much more about what the Speaker does, from enforcing discipline to his decisions in the case of tied votes and what regard he should have for precedent. But the important message of this essay is that a good speaker—and I firmly believe Lindsay Hoyle to be one—is a neutral referee, there to maintain order and adherence to the House’s own rules. He is, as Lenthall said in 1642, its servant, and that is what he must remain.