Quentin Letts on the Labour plot to get John Bercow installed as Speaker

Before it became clear that maybe as few as three Conservative MPs voted for John Bercow to be Speaker it was clear to many that the Labour plot to install one of their own as Speaker would succeed. Quentin Letts in The Mail writes:

"There he stood in the big green Chair, puffed up like an amphibian that had scoffed too many vol au vents. ‘My first thought at this time,’ he said from Parliament's bully pulpit, ‘is, as you will understand, of...’ He was going to mention his wife but at this point a female voice from the Tory benches shouted: ‘Your wages.’

The same female voice - Nadine Dorries? - heckled the Father of the House when he announced Mr Bercow's ‘election as Speaker’. The voice cried: ‘As a Labour Speaker!’

Rancour, partisanship, a figure whose political philosophy dodges round the place like a bouncy ball: yes, folks, the House of cheats and nodding oil derricks just got its perfect Speaker. They went and did the impossible. They voted for someone who could be even worse than Gorbals Mick!

Large parts of the Tory benches refused to clap his election and they looked thoroughly sickened, sitting with arms crossed and shaking their heads. Real, gut-churning hatred. Little Squeaker Bercow has his work cut out....

The response among mainstream Tory MPs? I write this having just finished speaking to one. Sickened by Labour's support for a philosophical chameleon on the grounds that he was the ultimate non-Conservative, he called Mr Bercow's election ‘the worst sort of bloody political shenanigans’. There is determination among such people that that another election for Speaker be held at the start of the next Parliament.

Mr Bercow's little helpers, by then, may be thinner on the ground. He may find himself sailing out of that Chair faster than a lump of mashed potato off a schoolboy's fork."

Here's hoping that Labour's latest dirty trick proves as long lasting and incompetently implemented as most of their others have recently.