A Short Term Speaker is No Use for a Functional Parliament

The Speaker has to be confirmed in office by the House after a general election . Should there be a general election we might expect reasonably that an informally whipped Speaker election, now, will be put right next year if partisan Labour troughers, Labour's Scottish class warriors motivated by envy, spite and revenge for ousted Scottish sheet metal workers, and silly behaviour (as ever) from brownites pushes an ageing Labour party warhorse, who should be pulling a holiday caravan in peaceful retirement by now, onto a long suffering and irritated electorate.

It really would be best to choose a Speaker with some hope of lasting less than a year. Unless Parliament has less than a year in which it has any powers to act at all.

UPDATE

Not Scottish, not Labour, not Beckett. More could have been hoped for but not with an irresponsible, unparliamentary, partisan Labour majority and a secret ballot. Mr Bercow has to hold his seat if there is a general election - the convention that the Speaker is returned unopposed is accompanied by the convention that the Speaker leaves his Party, so the chances of Buckingham being left to Mr Bercow without challenge, even from a Conservative, are very low - and be confirmed by vote in the House in any new Parliament. Steps will have to be watched, Speakerhood displayed for these months guaranteed to him by the Lisbon Treaty ratification timetable.

New Labour might be surprised, too, how much the rewards of office in the hand will be hard to match by promises of reward in a post democratic nirvana. Beckett would have been moved and movable by loyalty to Party, Scottish was simply out of the question given vulnerability to the restoration of the English Parliament; Mr Bercow's master is his own interest, and then the Leader of the Conservative administration that will follow any general election. He cannot afford to be New Labour's man.