Deputy fires a parting shot at bossy Bercow

TrAdItIONALLY, MPs refrain from criticising an outgoing Speaker of the Commons. But the partisan antics of John Bercow over Brexit have changed all that.

In something of a first, the deputy Speaker dame Eleanor Laing has publicly attacked Bercow — who is finally standing down at the end of the month — without quite mentioning him by name.

Laing, a front-runner to replace the insufferably pompous Bercow, told me on my LBC radio show: ‘He rightly says the Speaker’s job is to protect minorities. Who is the significant minority in the Commons? the answer: MPs who voted Leave.

‘We are in a situation where the minority in the Commons is the same as the majority in the rest of the country. that is why we have this imbalance.’

Laing added that many MPs believed ‘ impartiality has been diminished’.

the tory MP for Epping Forest said that after six years in the deputy role she’d learned an important lesson: ‘ Your duty to the chair is far greater than your urge to get into an argument. You have got to learn to keep your mouth shut.’

And that’s something that blaring, bombastic John Bercow never understood.