LAST Christmas, Labour MPs all celebrated the festive season in the usual manner: they issued greetings to their constituents, praised local medical staff during the holiday period and they opened a card from John Bercow. "We all got one," claims a Labour MP. "Even then he was angling for the job."
With the resignation of Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons, a vacancy has arisen earlier than expected for the ambitious Conservative MP for Buckingham. Tomorrow, following an arcane round of voting that would make cardinals at the Va
tican feel at home, he will discover whether or not his long hours of palm-greasing will see him come out on top.
Bercow has long been the man to beat among the candidates for the job this weekend. But there are now signs that his plans may yet be disrupted. For while MPs may be hoping that the arrival of a new Speaker convinces the public that a new era of openness and high mindedness has returned to parliament, the election itself is showing that the dark arts of smears and innuendo are as alive as ever.
The usual rules of party politicking have been reversed in this particular election. Bercow, formerly a member of the ultra right-wing Monday Club, has undergone a staggering political transformation in recent years, even taking on an unpaid post for the Labour government as an adviser on the care of disabled children. Combine that with the fact the MP has, as many Conservative MPs see it, sucked up to Labour for personal gain, and the result is they loathe the man. Every effort is being mustered to prevent his election coming about. On Friday, the influential right-wing Guido Fawkes political website published a 20-year-old picture of Bercow which, it claimed, showed him addressing a Glasgow Rangers Supporters Club meeting. "Those Scottish (Catholic) Labour MPs who bet so successfully on the outcome of the last election for Speaker and are now considering backing Bercow might reflect on some of the traditional songs which John led the gathering in singing," declared Paul Staines, the author of the blog – who threatened darkly of embarrassing pictures to come.
And yet, as Staines declared, Labour MPs are preparing to support him nonetheless. Not only has Bercow won friends on the Labour benches (even last week he could be heard telling parliament that the government had "good intentions"), revenge is in the air. Many Labour MPs still want to hit back against "the toffs" on the Conservative benches who, they believe, "got one of their own" when they orchestrated the coup against Martin last month. Immediately after Martin announced his resignation, one Labour whip was heard muttering that his "people" were preparing to back Bercow. "If that's how the Tories want to play it (with Martin], they can have Bercow," he added.
So, with many Labour MPs feeling it is time for a Conservative to take the chair anyway, and with Labour still commanding a huge majority in the Commons, the widespread view over recent weeks has been that Bercow's place in the Speaker's chair is all but sealed. Except that this weekend, the mood is beginning to shift. The complicated election for Speaker is incredibly difficult to predict. MPs will vote in successive ballots until one of their number gets 50 per cent of the vote. After each unsuccessful ballot, the MP with the lowest votes drops out. A growing view is that while Bercow will easily win the first ballot, he will fall short of the 50 per cent necessary and that, having seen who comes second, MPs will then – so the theory goes – rush behind that person as the "Stop Bercow" candidate.
The most likely candidate for that role is former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, who will win support from those Labour MPs who choose not to support Bercow. Against her case is the fact many MPs believe they cannot have yet another Labour Speaker (her election, following Martin and Betty Boothroyd) would make it three in a row for Labour). She was also mauled recently on the BBC's Question Time after claiming the £600 she spent on garden plants and hanging baskets was "an error". But many Tories, it is thought, may vote for her, purely to prevent Bercow getting in. Other Labour MPs were also conceding that voting for Bercow simply to annoy the Tories wasn't a good enough reason to support him. Beckett's election could be decided if the favoured Conservative candidate, Sir George Young, has to drop out at an early stage. One experienced MP said: "I would expect Bercow to come out on top in the first round but then he won't make any advancement."
If not Beckett, Young himself could emerge from the pack, or even Sir Alan Haselhurst, the current deputy speaker. Odds on the latter shifted from 40-1 to 20-1 on Friday. Such is the open nature of the contest that even Anne Widdecombe or the Lib Dem Sir Alan Beith could yet be hauled up to the chair tomorrow. The Labour whips – so adamant that they would impose Bercow on the Tories two weeks ago – are now said to be relaxing their grip. "They haven't gone near us," says one Labour MP. "I don't think they know what's going on."
Whoever does win will have a monumental task to prevent a more widespread public savaging. Parliament's dislocation from the real world was summed up last week when, nearly two months after the first revelations about MPs' expenses were published in full in the Daily Telegraph, authorities finally released the data on their own website, but blanked out vast swathes citing data protection. The versions offered by the Commons authorities hid some of the more outrageous claims which were highlighted by the newspaper – for example those for "moat cleaning" and a "duck house". The new Speaker will have the job of trying to haul the institution into the real world.
Insiders say the departure of Martin was an absolute necessity. Officials and clerks who worked for him said they found it impossible to propose reforms because he saw every suggestion as a personal affront. The new Speaker is likely to move quickly to ensure that – as with the Scottish Parliament – the full details of expenses are published on the web every quarter.
But that is likely to be only the first of a raft of changes. If elected, Bercow says he intends to become the face of the new parliament, promising to appear regularly on television to speak up for MPs, effectively becoming the parliament's public spokesman. Bercow has also hinted at how he will strip whips of the right to select members of parliamentary committees in the hope they challenge government legislation more tightly. He also promises to give backbench MPs more clout.
Beckett is pledging similarly to reform parliament so that it has greater power to take on the executive. Haselhurst and Beith are also pledging to give backbenchers more clout in taking on the powers that be.
All these internal reforms are likely to be carried out with a minimum of fuss. But the Speaker's job will be trickier when it comes to a series of reforms soon to be unveiled for their finances. In October, the Committee on Standards in Public Life, led by Sir Christopher Kelly, is expected to offer new recommendations on MPs' pay and expenses.
Many MPs are expecting Kelly to support new measures to cut MPs' expenses but, in order to compensate, to increase their take-home pay. Consequently, parliamentarians are expecting a backlash of epic proportions, which will land on the Speaker's desk. "It'll be a very brave Speaker who stands up and says that, after all that's happened, what we should get is a massive pay rise," says one wry MP.
Two years ago, Bercow himself told a review of MPs' salaries that they should be paid the same as GPs and local authority chief executives, equivalent to more than £100,000 a year. The MP prides himself on being a gifted public communicator. Persuading an enraged public that MPs should see their salaries rise by £40,000 will test those skills to the full.
The tribal way in which the Speaker's race has been fought thus far suggests that this so-called "broken parliament" has still quite some way to go before being fixed. It is expected that the final result of tomorrow's vote will not come until late into the night. The bookies now declare that Beckett is the marginal favourite, with Bercow and Young close behind. But when MPs themselves do not know exactly how the vote will go, betting is a mug's game. The only certainty is this: the new Speaker of the House of Commons, the First Commoner of the Land, will need all the help he or she can get to drag the institution of parliament out of the gutter.
