Boris tells Bercow YOU’RE OUT!
It’s official – Tories will oust ‘biased’ Speaker by standing candidate against him
JOHN BERCOW’S role in blocking Brexit has sealed his fate as Commons Speaker, one of Boris Johnson’s most senior Ministers revealed yesterday.
Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom today confirms for the first time that the Conservative Party will defy convention and put up a candidate against him in the next Election.
Before becoming Speaker ten years ago, Mr Bercow was the Tory MP for Buckingham with a majority of more than 18,000, so the move is almost certain to lead to him losing his seat and the Election of a new Speaker.
The move is an act of revenge by Downing Street after Mr Bercow spoke out against the Prime Minister’s move to suspend Parliament, and then used Commons procedure to facilitate the successful move by pro-Remain MPs to block No Deal.
In an article for today’s MoS – printed below – Ms Leadsom says that, by allowing MPs to take over the Parliamentary timetable, the Speaker ‘hasn’t just bent the rules, he has broken them’.
The Cabinet Minister – who clashed repeatedly with Mr Bercow when she was Commons Leader – describes last Tuesday’s vote as ‘a flagrant abuse’, adding: ‘It is right that the Conservatives will recognise this fact at the next General Election by standing our candidate in Buckingham.’
Ms Leadsom adds that Mr Bercow’s decision to allow MPs to ban No Deal ‘acts in complete disregard to the will of the people – not just on Brexit, but on whom they have chosen to govern them. It adds insult to injury that in doing so, Labour have afforded themselves power without accountability. This is a route to the diminution of our democracy – which is why the Prime Minister is now calling for a General Election.
‘Bring it on, I say, and give us back an impartial Speaker.’
This newspaper revealed last week that angry Tory MPs had demanded that Mr Bercow should be punished for his ‘blatant Brexit bias’ by being booted out of his Commons constituency, shattering the tradition that Speakers are not opposed by the major political parties when they stand for re-election. Natascha Engel – one of Mr Bercow’s former Deputy Speakers – accused him of being ‘in open opposition to the people who voted to leave’ and of risking the hard Brexit that Remainers want to avoid.
Mr Bercow, who voted Remain in 2016, had enraged Ministers and Brexit-backing Tories the previous week by interrupting his holiday in Turkey to brand the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue Parliament a ‘constitutional outrage’.
Mr Bercow also told an audience in Scotland that he would fight any attempt by Mr Johnson to suspend Parliament if MPs try to block Brexit ‘with every bone in my body’.
He added: ‘We cannot have a situation in which Parliament is shut down – we are a democratic society. Parliament will be heard and nobody is going to get away, as far as I am concerned, with stopping that happening.’
The remarks, together with claims that he has held secret talks with anti-No Deal Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin, fuelled Brexiteer suspicions – which were subsequently borne out – that he would ‘bend’ the Commons rules to help prevent Mr Johnson getting Brexit over the line by October 31.
The Mail on Sunday also revealed last month that, before he became Speaker, Mr Bercow had held talks with Gordon Brown’s Government about becoming a Labour Minister.
Friends of Mr Bercow insisted that the talks with Mr Brown’s aides were ‘ancient history’ and although Mr Bercow’s wife Sally was ‘keen’ for him to defect, the Speaker himself was ‘never that close to doing it’.