SPEAKER TELLS OF FAMILY TRAGEDY

– that can’t be right, and I’m not against hairdressing,” he says. Having spent a decade ring debates without pushing his politics – he won’t say how he voted e Europe referendum – this political ran is less abrasive than Bercow. nd he is keen to embrace tradition ringing back the wig and buckled es worn for centuries on state sions before Bercow dropped them. When I was mayor of Chorley, the gs they made me put on mean ’ll hold no fears for me,” he says. r Lindsay ran a company printing s on police and ambulance uniforms re winning his seat from the Tories ony Blair’s 1997 landslide. e would clash with Blair on university tuition fees and had a populist eye, once calling for Heathrow to be renamed in memory of Diana Princess of Wales.

At heart, though, he was and still is a trade union activist, admired for treating the most junior staff with respect.

Asked what makes him angry, the reply is immediate and clear. “I don’t like bullies and injustice.” Recalling an incident when a tearful waitress in the Commons tea room approached him about being poorly treated by a female MP, he says: “She came up to me really upset.

“‘Mr Hoyle’ she said, can I have a word with you?’ ‘Of course,’ I said.

“She told me, nearly in tears, nobody had spoken to her like that before.

“I promised it would be dealt with and

I went to see the chief whip and it was. There’s no excuse for bullying. I don’t care what caused it. Whatever it was doesn’t make it acceptable.

“Every member of staff is as important to me as the Clerk of the House.

“I was touched they had come to see me and they can, any time. I suppose it’s the old trade unionist in me, standing up for what’s right and against wrong.”

Being named after Australian cricketer Lindsay Hassett, from the “Invincibles” who whitewashed England in 1948, helped make him stronger, he chuckles.

“When you go to school with farmers’ sons called John and Steven it doesn’t half toughen you up to be called Lindsay.

“I was the boy called Sue of the song. You don’t know the stick I’ve had.

“I still get mistaken for a woman.

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