Speaker’s parrot dupes travellers on rail journeys

The Speaker of the House of Commons’ parrot is confusing rail passengers by squawking “lock the doors” and “order order” while on train journeys.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who took over from John Bercow in November, takes his pets with him when driving or taking the train from Westminster to his Chorley constituency.

He and his wife Catherine take tortoise Maggie, cat Patrick, rottweiler Gordon and terrier Betty as well as parrot Boris.

He said: “The parrot Boris will be shouting away to us – his latest is ‘point of order, point of order’ so I’ll have lots of ‘points of order’ going north. It’ll be fun – the cat just ignores it all.”

But he said that when they are not all travelling in the family estate car, he takes the train – with the cat and parrot in baskets.

“I’ll put (the parrot) down and he’ll start shouting ‘lock the doors, lock the doors’ and people on the train start looking around saying ‘who’s shouting lock the doors?’

“They can see I’m not speaking, but there’s this parrot in my box going ‘order, order’ or ‘lock the doors’.”

Sir Lindsay said he believes Boris picked up the phrases because his wife “deliberately” places the parrot next to the television.

The Commons Speaker makes the call for doorkeepers to “lock the doors” to the division lobbies eight minutes after calling a vote in the chamber.

Sir Lindsay became Labour MP for Chorley in 1997 and served as deputy speaker from 2010 until last year.