Why Gorbals Mick must stay - for now

I last wrote about Mr Speaker Martin on this blog in November 2006, after he had blocked David Cameron from asking pointless questions about who Tony Blair would be endorsing in the Labour leadership election.

On that occasion, I wrote that while I sympathised with Martin as a victim of the snobocracy which seeks to belittle anyone from a working-class background who rises above his station, the media hostility towards him was entirely explicable in view of his legendary acts of pettiness towards our profession in the past.

Furthermore, the cirumstances of his election in 2000 showed the Labour Party at its very worst and, like much else that happened in the party between 1994 and 2007, was a direct consequence of the Blair-Brown feud.

Blair stumbled into it by appearing to support the election of a Lib Dem speaker - his favoured candidate was in fact Ming Campbell. It provoked a backlash from backbench Labour MPs which was then gleefully stoked-up by the Brownites in order to deliver a bloody nose to Mr Tony.

One MP, a very close ally of the then Chancellor, said to me afterwards: "It was a chance for us working-class boys to put one over on the public schooboys." That was basically code for: "It was a chance for Brown to put one over on Blair."

Had No 10 not made the mistake of seeking to involve itself in an election that has always been a jealously-guarded prerogative of MPs, it is doubtful in my view that Martin would ever have been elected.

However, while I don't think the election of Mr Speaker Martin was exactly the best days' work the House of Commons ever did, the important thing about it was that it was a House of Commons decision, rather than one imposed by the executive.

And that is what is troubling me about the current wave of demands for the Speaker to go - that if he were to accede to them, it would set an extraordinarily bad precedent over one of the few offices in our constitution which is genuinely independent of the government.

If such a precedent were to be established, a future government could use that precedent to get rid of a Speaker it didn't like. That in turn would remove one of the last bastions of House of Commons independence.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I support Michael Martin's right to retire at a time of his own choosing. Although I also happen to think he should choose to go, as Betty Boothroyd did in 2000, before rather than after the next general election.

Not Black Wednesday yet

This weekend's column in the Newcastle Journal naturally focuses on the political fallout thus far from the Northern Rock nationalisation, announced a week ago today.

The full version is on Behind the Lines as usual but the digested read is:

Labour did the right thing nationalising the bank, although, driven by an irrational fear of the n-word, they took slightly too long to get there.

The Tories' response to the crisis has been confused from the start, as a result of which the party has failed to articulate a credible alternative.

The public's reaction thus far demonstrates that this has not been Labour's Black Wednesday, although there remain unanswered questions over Granite.

All in all, the whole episode ought to mark the end of our love affair with financial deregulation.

The Chairmen's Pint

Good to see some old lobby traditions have survived despite the demise of the old Press Bar. And congratulations to the two new chairmen Colin Brown and Ben Brogan - a formidable duo if ever there was one.

The QT review

Last night's Question Time from Newcastle was understandably devoted to Northern Rock. Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of it was the reaction of the audience. Even allowing for the fact that this is a Labour-supporting area, there was no great outpouring of anger against the Government, confirming me in my view that this is not currently being seen by the public as "Labour's Black Wednesday."

This week has been Vince Cable's moment of triumph after advocating nationalisation from the start, but he was surprisingly understated last night. Maybe this is what makes him such an effective operator. He also told it like it is, risking the wrath of the North-East audience saying "it is very clear that the Bank has to be shrunk."

By contrast, Derek Simpson, general secretary of Unite, played to the gallery and spoke up for the workers. It was significant, though, that he got the biggest cheers of the evening not for lambasting the government, but for saying that he "has trouble understanding Conservative policies."

That was not necessarily the fault of Tory panellist Alan Duncan, the shadow minister for Tyneside, but like David Cameron and George Osborne earlier in the week, he failed to articulate a plausible alternative policy, nor explain which of the six different policies espoused by the Tories since last autumn was curently in favour.

Spectator Political Editor Fraser Nelson made the point that Gordon Brown's regulatory framework had been at fault for allowing the situation at NR to get out of control in the first place, but without pointing out that the Tories have previously favoured even lighter regulation. I rate Fraser pretty highly as an operator but I thought this was a rather careless omission.

Ruth Kelly, for the government, was impressive in a quietly authoritative sort of way. Apart from one brief foray into Ed Balls-style spouting of economic bullet-points (someone should tell Labour that the political dividend from Bank of England independence has long since been used up) she seemed to be on her home ground talking about economic matters. Could she yet be the first female Chancellor?