Speaker of the House of Commons

The Speaker of the House of Commons presides over the elected chamber of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of America. The Speaker keeps order, decides who may speak, rules on procedure, certifies money bills, and may recall Parliament in an emergency. The Speaker does not vote except to break a tie, holds no party, and is expected to be impartial between the parties in a chamber built entirely out of them.

The office has existed since 1783, when the interim assembly of the Constitutional Interregnum under the Charter of Union chose Benjamin Harrison to preside; he was confirmed as the first Speaker when Parliament first sat in 1785. There have been thirty-five holders. The present Speaker is Mark Kelly, elected on 18 September 2028.

It did not begin as an impartial office and nobody can say when it became one. The chair of the early Realm named committees and packed them, spoke in debate, voted in ordinary divisions, negotiated with ministries over their legislative programmes, and campaigned at general elections. Henry Clay, Speaker from 1811 to 1816, did all five, and did them better than anyone before or since. What followed was not a reform. Successive Speakers each gave something up and none of them gave it back, the party whips grew strong enough that ministries no longer needed the chair, and the office arrived at impartiality without a resolution, a statute or a date. The rule that now governs the office is a convention and nothing else, and the Realm has never tested what would happen if a Speaker broke it.

The chair also carries a power that has nothing to do with the House. Under the Regency Act 1811 the incapacity of the Sovereign is declared by five officers of the Realm, by a majority, on the evidence of physicians, and the Speaker of the House of Commons is one of the five. The Act has been engaged twice: in 1811, for the last illness of George III, whose incapacity Parliament declared directly, and in September 2028, when the King was brought unconscious to New Westminster after the loss of Kittyhawk: the five met on the 29th and did not act, and on the 30th, on his physicians’ certificate, declared him incapable. He woke on 20 October, and the five met that morning and resolved that the declaration stands until his physicians certify that he can act.

And there is a hole in it. There is no arrangement for a Speaker who cannot act. The deputies deputise for an absence and their authority is the Speaker’s own, delegated, so it fails at exactly the moment it is needed. The Realm discovered this in 1943, when the Speaker suffered a stroke in the same weeks that the Prime Minister collapsed, and the Commons dealt with it by dragging the Father of the House to the chair by acclamation while the Clerk recorded that he could not advise it. No statute followed. No serious proposal has ever been made. The question was live again in September 2028 and remains unanswered.

The office in 1783

The Charter of Union made no provision for the office. It established a Parliament of two Houses and left the elected House to arrange its own proceedings, which meant that the Commons had to invent a chair before it could do anything else, including decide how to elect one.

Benjamin Harrison, a Virginian planter, was chosen in 1783 to preside over the interim assembly, to reassure a south that had lost the argument over the capital, and was confirmed as Speaker when the Commons first sat in 1785. He is remembered for nothing. He presided over a Parliament that did not know how to run itself, in a chamber whose procedures were being written as they were used, and the record of his years is a record of a House learning the trade rather than of a man practising it. Almost every rule the Realm’s Commons now lives by was settled after him.

What the first decades did establish, without deciding it, was that the chair belonged to the majority. A Speaker was elected by the members who had the numbers, served their interest, and was replaced when the numbers changed. Eight men held the office in the first twenty-eight years.

Clay

Henry Clay of Kentucky was elected to the chair in 1811, at an age that made the choice remarkable at the time and has made it impossible since. He held it until 1816, when he left it for the front bench, and went on to build the Whig counter-coalition against Jackson and to spend the rest of his life as one of the most partisan figures in the Realm’s politics.

Nothing about that sequence is scandalous on the standards of 1811 and all of it is unthinkable on the standards of the present. From the chair Clay named the select committees and packed them, so that the composition of every inquiry in the Commons ran through one man’s judgement of what the House should conclude. He spoke in debate, descending to the floor to argue and returning to preside over the division. He voted in ordinary divisions and not only to break ties. He negotiated with the ministry over its legislative programme, trading time for amendments as a party manager would. And he campaigned for candidates at a general election while holding the office that would rule on their conduct if they won.

He was extremely good at it. The American System, the doctrine of national economic development that defined a generation of the Realm’s politics, was built in substantial part out of committees he had composed for the purpose. The Commons of the 1810s got more done than the Commons of the 1790s, and the reason was the chair.

He is remembered as the greatest occupant of the office and as the worst, and the two verdicts are held at once and by the same people. The first is a judgement about competence and the second is a judgement made with two centuries of hindsight against a standard that did not exist while he sat. The Register records both and does not reconcile them. Calling Clay the worst Speaker the Realm has had is unfair, and it is said.

After Clay

His successor in 1816 was a deliberate nonentity, chosen by a House that had decided, without debating it, that it did not want another Clay. The man did little and is remembered for less, and that was the point of him.

No date can be given for the change that followed. There was no resolution, no statute, no scandal and no reforming Speaker. What happened instead was two things at once, neither of them anybody’s decision.

The first is that successive Speakers each gave something up. One stopped speaking in debate, and nobody noticed at the time, and no successor resumed it. Another stopped voting except on ties. Another stopped taking a view on the ministry’s programme. Each renunciation was a personal choice by a particular man in a particular year, made for reasons that were usually local and occasionally just temperamental, and each became the practice because the next Speaker inherited a chair from which the thing had already gone.

The second is that the parties stopped needing the chair. As the whips grew into a professional machinery through the middle of the nineteenth century, a ministry could deliver its own majority without the presiding officer’s help, and an office that had been worth capturing became an office that was merely useful to keep neutral. The chair’s partisanship did not so much end as cease to be worth anything.

The result is that the Realm’s Speakership arrived at impartiality the way a river arrives at a delta, and that the impartiality of the chair rests today on no written rule of any kind.

The civil war

The Speaker of the Parliament that sat through the American Civil War is credited with keeping the Commons sitting, which is the whole of his reputation and is a considerable reputation.

He held the chair throughout. He refused to be drawn on the constitutional status of members who did not attend, declined to rule their seats vacant, kept the order paper moving through sessions in which a third of the chamber’s business was about the war and the rest was about nothing, and treated the House’s continued existence as the one thing in his gift. The Commons met, and went on meeting, and the Realm’s later writers have taken that as the answer to the question of what a Speaker is for during a crisis of the state.

The Reform Act of 1859

The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 passed through a Commons whose Speaker wanted it to pass, and the difference that made was procedural rather than political.

His contribution was a run of admissibility rulings in committee. A bill of that size attracts wrecking amendments, and a chair that admits them all can kill a measure without ever voting against it. He did not admit them all. The rulings were within his discretion, they were defensible one by one, and their cumulative effect was to keep the Act alive through the stage at which it was most vulnerable. Nobody has ever established that he did it deliberately, and nobody who has looked at the rulings believes he did not.

It is the clearest demonstration in the Realm’s history of what an impartial chair can do without being partial, and it is not usually offered as a compliment.

The nineteenth-century chair

The office reached its modern shape in the second half of the century, in the hands of a series of Speakers whose common characteristic was that they said as little as possible.

The one who did most to make it so held the chair in the late nineteenth century and is the man generally credited with making the chair silent: with establishing that the Speaker’s opinions are not merely unspoken but are understood not to exist, that the office has no view on any question before the House, and that a Speaker who is quoted on anything outside the conduct of proceedings has made a mistake. The convention that a Speaker speaks in public only about the institution itself, its access, its security and its estate, and never about policy, dates from him.

The staff-appointments scandal of the 1890s is the one blot on the office’s record. The Speaker of the day filled the House’s offices with his own relatives, on the reasoning, which he stated when challenged, that the appointments were in his personal gift and always had been. They were. He resigned before anybody could move against him, which is why the Realm can say that no Speaker has ever been forced out of the chair, a claim that is technically exact and rather thin.

1943

In 1943 the Speaker, Alvin Cardell, member for an Ohio seat, suffered a stroke at home and was found by his wife.

It happened in the same weeks that Franklin D. Roosevelt collapsed. The concurrence is what mattered. The Prime Minister could not give ordinary advice and the officer responsible for organising the Commons’ response to that could not perform the role, in the middle of a world war, and for a short period the route by which advice became Crown action and Parliament assembled did not exist.

George C. Marshall, as Governor-General, used the reserve authority of the Crown in right of America for the first time in the Realm’s history, recognising Cabinet’s collective advice for indispensable continuity and enabling Parliament to be summoned. Government House did not choose who would preside. Marshall was explicit that it could not, that the reserve existed to restore Parliament’s ability to act and not to make the Crown the judge of arguments belonging inside the chamber.

So the Commons chose for itself, and what it did was not provided for anywhere.

The Father of the House took the chair by acclamation. He was the longest-serving member, a very old man of the governing party, which made the arrangement awkward in exactly the way the office exists to avoid, and the House called him to the chair without a ballot, without a motion and without a division. The Clerk recorded in the minute that he could not advise it. The House did it anyway.

It was never challenged. A war was on, the arrangement worked, and the silence that followed is the most telling part of the episode. No committee reported on it. No bill was drafted. When Cardell returned to the chair, partly recovered and never the same again, the question of what should have happened if he had not returned was simply left where it lay.

The Realm’s considered view, offered without embarrassment, is that the best Speaker it ever had was the Father of the House of 1943, who was never Speaker at all.

The health service certificate

Cardell went in the end, and his successor did the boldest thing any occupant of the chair has done.

The bill founding the National Health Service of America was certified a money bill. A money bill deals exclusively with the raising or spending of public money; the House of Lords may not amend one and may delay it only thirty days; and the Speaker’s certificate that a bill is a money bill is not subject to review by the Lords or by anyone else.

The Lords said it was not a money bill. On its face they had an argument, since the measure founded an institution as well as paying for one, and a certificate that can cover a bill of that kind can cover almost anything. They went to the courts. The courts declined to look behind the certificate, holding that the statute made the Speaker’s determination conclusive and that the question was not one a court could reach.

He was, on the merits, plainly right. The Lords were chancing it, and knew they were, and the attack was made on the certificate rather than on the man, which is the reason the episode did the office no lasting damage. It remains the single occasion on which a ruling from the chair decided the shape of the Realm’s domestic settlement.

Television

Radio came early and caused no argument. Television came in the 1980s and the Speaker of the day fought it and lost.

His objection was that the chamber would begin performing for the cameras and that the performance would replace the work, which turned out to be partly right and did not save him. The House voted for the cameras and imposed rules the chair was then made responsible for enforcing, chief among them that the broadcast must not show disorder, a rule that survived for decades and was mocked for most of them. It was relaxed after the May Day Bombings, when a Commons that had spent a decade arguing about secrecy found it could not defend a rule requiring it to conceal its own behaviour, and the cameras now show everything.

After May Day

The most consequential modern Speaker held the chair in the years after the bombings, and made one argument constantly: that a minister who has something to tell the Realm must tell the House of Commons first.

The device was the urgent question, which is entirely in the chair’s gift. A Speaker who grants them freely can compel a minister to the despatch box at a few hours’ notice on any subject the chair thinks the House is entitled to hear about, and a Speaker who grants them sparingly cannot. He granted them, relentlessly, against ministries of both colours, on the reasoning that a security settlement announced to newspapers rather than to Parliament was a settlement Parliament had not agreed to.

He also cast the third of the Realm’s three casting votes, on a security bill, for further debate, and the additional debate changed the bill. He is still alive, sits in the House of Lords, and has never discussed it.

Considine

Margaret Considine, member for a Michigan seat and a Liberal Federal Democrat before her election, was the first woman to hold the office and the thirty-fourth Speaker.

The election passed almost without comment, which she found more annoying than opposition would have been, and said so, once, some years afterwards. She built on her predecessor’s practice and went further with it, granting urgent questions on a scale no Speaker had attempted, to the point that ministers complained publicly that the chair had converted a discretion into a summons. She retired at the dissolution of 2028 after two Parliaments and took the customary viscountcy.

She and Mark Kelly did not get on. She protected him when he named the Realm’s largest agricultural water allocations in the chamber by holder, and protected him reluctantly, and made the reluctance evident. When the question of his standing for the chair arose she told him she thought the marriage made it impossible, which was the only occasion on which she gave a view about her own succession, and she was overruled by the House.

Kelly

The Parliament returned at the general election of 7 September 2028 met on 18 September and elected Mark Kelly, the member for Phoenix East and Tempe, a retired naval officer and astronaut who had sat for a decade as the only independent in the House.

He is the first Speaker to have had no party to resign. Every previous holder gave up a party membership on election; Kelly had none, having left the Liberal Federal Democrats in 2019 and sat under no whip since. The House knew what it was buying. The decade of independence that had made him ineffective on the benches, with no bloc, no patron and no ambition the parties could recognise, was precisely the specification for the chair.

He was dragged to it unopposed, no other candidate having been nominated. Nobody opposed him on account of his marriage to the Lord Marcher of Arizona, although the conflict had produced the Realm’s first register of members’ interests the previous year. He raised the objection himself in his first week and undertook to leave the chair for any business touching his wife’s offices, and the House accepted that.

Seven days later the King’s aircraft was lost, and the chair did three things in a fortnight that the office had not done before. He telephoned the Prime Minister on the night of 25 September to offer the recall, which is the Speaker’s own to offer. He admitted the Prime Minister to the bar of the House on the 26th, a peer being unable to sit in the Commons and the House requiring him. And on 29 September he sat as one of the five officers of the Regency Act.

Election to the chair

A Speaker is elected by the House at the beginning of each Parliament and whenever the chair falls vacant. The method is a secret exhaustive ballot: members vote, the candidate with fewest votes is eliminated, and the process repeats until one candidate has a majority of those voting. Where only one candidate is nominated, as happened at the election of September 2028, there is no ballot.

The Governor-General signifies approbation of the choice, in a formal message received by the House. The approbation has never been refused and there is no agreed account of what would follow if it were. It is a survival from the colonial assemblies, where the governor’s approval was a real veto, and the Realm has kept the form and forgotten the substance, as it has with several things.

The ceremony of dragging the Speaker to the chair survives. The Speaker-elect is pulled to it by members of the House, in a show of reluctance inherited from a parliament in which the office was dangerous and the reluctance was not a show. It is performed in full. In September 2028 it was, on the evidence of everyone present, not entirely feigned.

A new Speaker must resign any party membership. This is a rule of the House and not of any party, and it is the only part of the impartiality settlement that is actually written down anywhere. Kelly is the first holder for whom it was a formality.

Impartiality

The Speaker does not vote, does not speak in debate, does not express a view on any question before the House, does not campaign, and does not belong to a party. None of that is in a statute. Almost none of it is in the standing orders. It is convention, sustained by the fact that everybody has behaved as though it were binding for something over a century and a half.

What would happen if a Speaker broke it is the question nobody can answer. There is no mechanism to remove a Speaker: no motion of no confidence in the chair has ever been moved, and it is not clear what the procedural route for one would be, since the chair would preside over it. The general view, which has never been tested, is that nothing formal would happen and the House would simply stop obeying, which is worse than a removal and slower.

No Speaker has ever been forced out. The 1890s scandal ended in a resignation offered before any move was made, and the record therefore holds on a technicality that the Realm does not much like examining.

The casting vote

The Speaker votes only when the House is tied, and then must vote, because a tie is not a decision.

The convention governing how is inherited from Westminster and has never been written down in the Realm. The chair casts for further debate and against a final decision: on an early stage, so the House may continue to consider the matter; against a motion that would settle a question the House has not settled for itself. The principle is that a casting vote should leave the decision with the members wherever possible.

It has been used three times since 1783.

The first was a nineteenth-century tariff, cast for further debate. The bill died anyway, at a later stage and by an ordinary majority, which is the outcome the convention is designed to permit. The Speaker who cast it is chiefly remembered for something else: he was the first Speaker from west of the mountains, and in the Realm’s memory of the chair that fact has entirely displaced the vote.

The second was a confidence motion in the 1960s, in the rights era, cast against the final decision, so that a ministry survived a night it would otherwise have lost.

The third was post-May Day security legislation, cast for further debate, and the extra debate changed the bill.

All three were orthodox. No Speaker has ever cast against the convention, which is the main reason nobody has ever seriously proposed writing it down.

Order and discipline

The chair’s routine authority rests on the word Order, which is what the Speaker says and all the Speaker says, and on the House’s willingness to obey it.

Where it is not obeyed, the Speaker may direct a member to withdraw for the remainder of the day’s sitting. Beyond that lies naming: the Speaker names the member, a minister moves that the member be suspended, and the House votes. Naming is rare and effective precisely because it hands the decision to the chamber. A named member who survives the vote has beaten the chair, which is why chairs do not name members they might lose.

The gravest ordinary offence is to call another member a liar, which must be withdrawn. A member who will not withdraw goes.

The Speaker’s orders are enforced by the Serjeant at Arms, a retired officer who attends the House, carries a sword and has never drawn it. Members have been physically removed on several occasions, most memorably during the May Day debates.

Money bills

A bill dealing exclusively with the raising or spending of public money is a money bill. The Lords may not amend one and may delay it only thirty days. The Speaker certifies whether a bill is a money bill, and the certificate is conclusive.

It is the chair’s largest single power and the one most obviously capable of abuse, because the definition is a matter of judgement and the judgement cannot be reviewed. It has been tested once, over the health service, and the courts declined to look behind the certificate. Proposals to make the certificate reviewable have been floated and none has ever been pressed.

Recall and urgent business

The Speaker may recall Parliament from recess in an emergency. Until 2028 the power was in practice exercised only on the ministry’s request, which made the chair the instrument of a decision taken elsewhere. Kelly’s telephone call to the Prime Minister on the night of 25 September 2028 reversed the direction of the request without altering the rule, and it is not yet clear whether that is a precedent or an incident.

Urgent questions are entirely in the chair’s gift, and they are the sharpest weapon the office has. A Speaker may require a minister to attend the House at a few hours’ notice and answer on a matter the chair judges urgent. There is no appeal. A ministry that would rather announce a policy to the press than to Parliament can be prevented from doing so by one person, and the two Speakers before Kelly both used the power for exactly that purpose.

Emergency debates require the leave of the House as well as the chair’s selection, which is the only part of the emergency machinery the Speaker does not hold alone.

The bar of the House

The Prime Minister, Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock, is a peer and cannot sit in the Commons. The ministry is answered for in the elected chamber by Priya Raghunathan, the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House, who takes the weekly questions and speaks for the government every sitting day.

On 26 September 2028, with the King missing and the House recalled, the Commons wanted the Prime Minister himself and there was no procedure by which it could have him. Kelly found one. The bar of the House is the boundary at which a person who is not a member may be heard, and the Speaker’s power to admit someone to it for a stated purpose had lain unused so long that the Clerk had to find the precedent rather than supply it.

He proposed it on the morning of the 26th, took the Clerk’s advice, and put it to the House as a matter for the chair rather than as a motion, so there was no division on it. That is why it is now a precedent. Whether it becomes a routine device for a ministry led from the Lords, or remains an emergency measure used once, has not been settled, and Kelly has said nothing about it either way.

Privilege

Parliamentary privilege protects what a member says in the House from action in the courts. The Speaker rules on a question of privilege in the first instance, and may refer it to a committee of privileges, which reports to the House.

The chair’s protection is not a favour and is regularly extended to members the Speaker would rather not protect. When Kelly, then a back-bench member, named the Realm’s largest agricultural water allocations by holder, the naming was protected and the Speaker of the day, Considine, made her reluctance plain while protecting him. That is the ordinary working of the office: the protection is owed to the House and not to the member, and the chair’s opinion of the member is irrelevant and is sometimes visible.

The Regency Act 1811

Under the Regency Act 1811 the incapacity of the Sovereign is declared by five officers of the Realm, by a majority, on the evidence of physicians: the Governor-General, the Chief Justice of the United Kingdom of America, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Speaker, and the Prime Minister.

The Charter of Union made no provision for a regency. The Realm’s Parliament passed its own Act in 1811, alongside the British Act of the same year, for the last illness of George III, so that the Prince Regent might act in the American capacity under American law. It was used immediately and the regency ran nine years.

The inclusion of the Speaker was the least contentious part of the Act. The argument at the time was about the Prime Minister, and about whether the Chief Justice could sit on a question that might later come before a court, and the presiding officer of the elected House passed without objection as the obvious representative of the chamber that pays for the Crown.

The Act remains in force. It was engaged for the second time on 29 September 2028, when the King was found alive after the loss of Kittyhawk and brought unconscious to New Westminster. The five met informally in the Speaker’s own rooms at Parliament House, on the ground that those rooms are neither Government House nor the ministry’s, and did not act: the physicians would not use the word permanent, and the Act requires evidence of incapacity rather than of injury. The meeting was announced the same day. No formal note was taken, and one of the five is understood to have kept a private record.

The two presiding officers arrived together, deliberately, so that neither would be seen to have spoken first.

The five met again the next day and acted. In the small hours of 30 September the King’s physicians certified that he would remain unconscious for some weeks, and at a second meeting in the same rooms all five signed a declaration that he was incapable, the first exercise of the power in the Act’s history. The Speaker wrote a note beneath his signature, that he signed because the King was unconscious and for no other reason and that the declaration should end when the King wakes, and undertook to report the declaration to the House at its next sitting.

The King woke in the small hours of 20 October. The five met in the same rooms that morning and resolved that the declaration of 30 September stands until the King’s physicians certify that he is capable of performing the royal functions. Kelly concurred, and wrote beneath the resolution that by “wakes” he had meant able to act. The King is awake for short spells and performs no function, and the Queen continues as Regent.

Whether the Act should be reformed is being discussed, and the objection most often made is not to the Speaker’s membership but to the Prime Minister’s.

Certifying the arithmetic

Where a Parliament is hung or a ministry’s majority is in doubt, the Speaker certifies the arithmetic to Government House: the result of a division, or the number of members who have signed an indication of support. The certificate states a fact.

It does not state a conclusion. Whether a member commands the confidence of the Commons is a constitutional judgement, and that judgement belongs to the Governor-General and is the real weight of that office. The chair supplies the numbers and stops. The distinction is carefully kept on both sides, and the reason it is kept is that a Speaker who certified confidence rather than arithmetic would be choosing ministries, which is precisely the thing the office gave up in the nineteenth century.

The Speaker’s Conference

A Speaker’s Conference is an all-party body convened by the chair to settle a question of the franchise, the boundaries or the composition of the House on which ordinary party negotiation has failed. It has been used a few times.

The most recent was convened by Considine on the question of the Territory of Loreto, whose five members sit in a House otherwise composed of polity representation, and specifically on whether the Territory should have more members as its population grows.

It has not met since the dissolution of 2028, and Kelly has not reconvened it. His wife has been proposed as Loreto’s Governor-Palatine, a proposal that requires the federal ministry’s concurrence, and a conference is not a sitting of the House from which a chair can withdraw for one item. His answer, so far, has been to leave it unconvened, which is a way of managing the conflict and is not a solution to it.

Deputies, and the hole in the arrangements

The House elects a Chairman of Ways and Means and two Deputy Chairmen, who preside in the Speaker’s absence and take the chair in committee of the whole House. They are elected by the House and not appointed by the Speaker, which was intended to give them a standing of their own.

It does not give them one when it matters. Their authority to preside is the Speaker’s authority, delegated. A deputy covers an absence: an illness of a week, a dinner, a day when the chair must be elsewhere. A deputy cannot act where there is no Speaker capable of delegating, which is why the machinery failed completely in 1943 and the Commons had to drag the Father of the House to the chair by acclamation. And a deputy cannot cure a Speaker who is capable but conflicted, because a deputy exercising the Speaker’s authority on business in which the Speaker has an interest is still exercising the Speaker’s authority.

Both of those are live. The first has been open since 1943 and no statute has ever been drafted and no serious proposal has ever been made. The second was raised by Kelly himself in his first week, when he undertook to leave the chair for business touching his wife’s offices, and the question of who takes it in his place has not been settled. The Clerk regards it as urgent.

The officers of the House

The Clerk of the House of Commons is the principal permanent officer and the source of most of what the chair knows. The Clerk advises on procedure, certifies bills, keeps the record and holds the institutional memory across Parliaments. The distinction between advising and deciding is guarded on both sides: the Clerk advises, the Speaker decides, and a Speaker who overrules the Clerk on procedure is taking a real risk in public.

Kelly overruled the Clerk once, in his second week, over the admission of the Prime Minister to the bar, and the ruling stood and became the practice. The Clerk of the House, Imogen Halvorsen, found the precedent she had advised against relying on, and has since described the deputy question as the most urgent unsettled matter in the Commons’ procedure.

The Serjeant at Arms attends the House, enforces the Speaker’s orders, and is responsible for the chamber and its approaches. The post is held by a retired officer, at present Colonel Desmond Achterberg, and carries a sword which has never been drawn.

The Gentleman Usher of the Ebony Rod belongs to the Lords rather than the Commons and appears here once a session, to summon the elected House to hear the Speech from the Throne.

The Speaker’s Counsel is the House’s own lawyer, independent of the government’s law officers. The office is quiet for years at a time and matters entirely when the Commons is in a dispute with the ministry, because a House advised on the law by the Attorney-General is a House advised by a member of the Cabinet.

The book, and the manual

The chair’s rulings are collected by the Clerk in a book that is the working constitution of the Realm’s procedure. It is consulted constantly. No Speaker is bound by a predecessor, and every Speaker says so on taking the chair, and every Speaker then follows the book almost without exception, because the alternative is to decide two centuries of settled questions again from first principles on a Tuesday afternoon.

The published manual of procedure is Redfern, named for the nineteenth-century Clerk who compiled it. Only the Clerk cites it. Members are not expected to have read it, and a member who quotes Redfern at another member is understood to be showing off.

The House of Commons Commission

The money, the staff and the estate of the Commons are the responsibility of a House of Commons Commission, chaired by the Speaker, which was created in the 1950s and is the direct descendant of the staff-appointments scandal of the 1890s. Before it, the House’s offices were in the chair’s personal gift.

Security of the parliamentary estate is held jointly with the Lord Speaker. It was nearly taken away from both of them after the May Day Bombings and given to the Home Office, and the argument that kept it where it is was that a legislature policed by the executive is not a legislature.

Ceremonial

The Speaker’s dress is a black silk gown with deep facings of navy blue, worn over court dress: a black coat and waistcoat, black knee breeches, black stockings and buckled shoes, with a white winged collar and a white bow tie. The full-bottomed wig is worn on state occasions only and not on an ordinary sitting day.

The navy facings are not ancient and are not heraldic. A Speaker of the eighteen-hundreds had them put on his gown because he liked them, and every successor has had them since.

The Chair is a high canopied seat of dark oak upholstered in green leather, raised a step above the floor, matching the benches. It was a gift from the House of Commons at Westminster, and the Realm has never much liked saying so. The fact is recorded on a small brass plate on the back of the chair, where the occupant cannot see it and the House cannot either.

The Mace lies on the table below the chair and the House is not sitting without it. It is the House’s own, made in 1783 to replace the royal mace of the colonial assembly, and the old mace was melted down and its silver used in the new one, which is either a thrifty piece of continuity or a very pointed one and has been read as both. No member has ever seized or removed it.

The arms of office are the Mace in saltire with a portcullis, impaled with the personal arms of each holder.

A procession with the Mace takes place at the opening of a session and not daily.

Prayers are read at the start of each sitting by a chaplain, and whether they should continue is a standing argument that has been running for about forty years without resolution. Kelly, who professes no religion, attends and does not join in, which was noticed briefly in his first week and satisfied everybody.

At the State Opening of Parliament the Speech from the Throne is read by the Sovereign when present and by the Governor-General otherwise. The Gentleman Usher of the Ebony Rod summons the Commons, which walks to the Lords chamber with the deliberate slowness that enacts its independence of the Crown, the Speaker at its head.

The word the chair uses is Order.

Language

There is no rule that the chair must rule in English. A member may be heard in louisianais, and the House provides interpreters, an arrangement that predates the modern Commons and is used a few times in most sessions.

Whether a Speaker could preside in louisianais has never arisen. When a Louisianais member was nominated for the chair in the 1970s and lost the ballot, the objection was widely understood to be about language and was never stated aloud by anybody, which is the most that can honestly be said about it.

The Speaker’s seat

A Speaker continues to sit for a constituency and continues to do its casework, which is most of what representation consists of. What the constituency loses is its vote, for the length of a Parliament, since the chair votes only to break a tie.

The large parties stand aside at the Speaker’s seat. They do not by any rule; they simply do not put up candidates. Fringe candidates always stand, always lose their deposits, and are the reason the seat is technically contested at every general election.

The answer the Realm gives to the charge that the chair silences a constituency is that the casework continues. It is not much of an answer and it is the only one on offer. A supernumerary member for the Speaker’s seat has been suggested from time to time and has never been proposed by anyone in a position to propose it.

Salary, residence and precedence

The Speaker is paid more than a Cabinet minister and less than the Prime Minister, which is a deliberate statement about where the office sits.

The residence is the Speaker’s apartment in Parliament House: a grand state apartment used for entertaining, with a small private flat behind it in which the Speaker actually lives. The five officers of the Regency Act met in the state rooms on 29 September 2028.

In the order of precedence the Speaker ranks fourth, after the Governor-General, the Chief Justice and the Prime Minister.

Leaving the chair

A Speaker serves until they choose to go. There is no term and no retiring age. Four have died in office, none of them in the chamber, and the plain explanation is long hours and old men and nobody with the standing to make them leave.

On retirement a Speaker receives a viscountcy, by a custom near enough to automatic that the exceptions are remembered. Former Speakers go to the House of Lords and, characteristically, chair things: inquiries, commissions and conferences, which is what a reputation for impartiality is for once the impartiality is no longer required.

A corridor of Parliament House carries a portrait of every Speaker. The Realm’s standing joke about the office is that nobody can name six of them.

The Lord Speaker

The Lord Speaker presides over the House of Lords from the Woolsack and is a genuinely different office, not a mirror of this one. The Lord Speaker has almost no power of order. The Lords keep their own discipline collectively, rulings come from the House and not the chair, and the presiding officer’s role is to manage the procedural life of the chamber rather than to govern its behaviour.

The two chairs communicate on matters needing both Houses, hold the security of the estate jointly, and are both among the five officers of the Regency Act, which is the only context in which they act as equals in the same room. In September 2028 they arrived at that room together, deliberately, so that neither would be seen to have spoken first.

The present Lord Speaker is a hereditary peer, the Earl of Rathmore, which says more about the Lords than about the office.

The chamber itself is treated in the House of Lords. The Lord Speakership has no article of its own in this Register and should have one.

Beyond the Realm

The presiding officers of the polity legislatures, the Speaker of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, the Speaker of the House of Delegates, the Speaker of the House of Deputies and the rest, have no constitutional relation to the federal chair whatever. They meet annually in a conference of presiding officers which is entirely social.

A conference of the Speakers of the King’s parliaments meets every three years in rotating capitals. It has produced nothing and is not intended to. There is no order of precedence within it, which was settled at the first meeting and has stayed settled.

Against Westminster’s Speakership the Realm’s is the same office with one addition, and the addition is large: no Speaker of the House of Commons at Westminster may declare the Sovereign incapable. On every other measure the Realm’s chair is the junior of the two and does not pretend otherwise.

Questions to ministers

The most watched thing the chair does is run questions, and the reason it is watched is that it is the only hour in the parliamentary week in which the House is unmistakably in charge of a minister rather than the other way round.

Departmental questions rotate. Questions to the Prime Minister are weekly, and the Speaker’s management of that session is the single most visible exercise of the office. The chair decides how long a question may run, when an answer has stopped being an answer, which back-bench members are called and in what order, and whether a minister who has not addressed the question will be made to stand again. None of that is in the standing orders in any detail. It is discretion, exercised in front of cameras, and a Speaker’s reputation is made there or not at all.

The present arrangement is peculiar. The Prime Minister, Lord Whitlock, is a peer and cannot sit in the Commons, so the weekly session is answered by Priya Raghunathan, the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House. The Commons has not liked this since the ministry was formed and says so regularly, and the chair’s position is that it can require the attendance of the minister responsible and cannot require the attendance of a member of the other House.

That is the constraint Kelly’s admission of the Prime Minister to the bar was built to escape, and it is why nobody yet knows whether the bar becomes routine. A House that has found a way to get at a Prime Minister it cannot otherwise reach will be reluctant to forget it.

Select committees

The Speaker allocates the chairs of select committees between the parties, in proportion to their strength in the House, and the parties then choose who holds the chairs allotted to them.

The division of that job is deliberate and it is Clay’s monument. The chair that once named the committees and packed them now performs the arithmetic and hands the result to somebody else, and the reform that separated the two functions was made, explicitly, against his memory. It is one of the few places in the office’s history where a change can be dated and a motive identified.

Where a committee’s composition is disputed, the Speaker rules. Where a member objects that a committee has strayed beyond its order of reference, the Speaker rules. Neither happens often.

Petitions

The Commons receives public petitions, and the Speaker is responsible for the form in which they are presented and for ruling on whether a petition is in order.

The old practice survives: a petition may be presented formally by a member at the close of the day’s business and placed in a bag behind the chair. The modern practice is what matters. A petition above a threshold of signatures must be answered, and a petition above a higher threshold must be considered by a committee, which reports. The thresholds were set by resolution and are adjusted from time to time by the House on the chair’s recommendation.

It is the least glamorous of the Speaker’s functions and one of the few that touches people who are not members.

The chair in public

A Speaker speaks in public about the institution and about nothing else. The access of the public to the estate, the security of the Palace, the state of the buildings, the conduct of members, the education of visiting schools: these are the chair’s subjects outside the chamber, and policy is not. The convention dates from Augustin Pell in the eighteen-eighties and has held without a serious breach.

Within that limit Speakers have been active. Considine’s programme of opening the estate to schools was hers personally and survived her. Vandermeer’s public argument that ministers should announce to Parliament before they announce to newspapers was conducted partly in lectures and interviews and was the reason it succeeded, since a convention that only the chair believes in is not a convention.

The Realm’s chair is quieter than Westminster’s. It produces no catchphrase, no theatrical calls to order and no personality that the public would recognise from the sound alone. The word is Order, plainly, and Speakers who have tried to make more of it have been thought vulgar.

Proposals for reform

No serious proposal to reform the office has ever been made.

That statement is stronger than it looks and is meant to be. Things have been suggested. A statutory deputy, after 1943; the removal of the Speaker from the Regency Act five; a fixed term; election of the chair by something other than the House; a money-bill certificate that a court could review. Each has been raised in a speech, in a pamphlet, in the correspondence of a learned society or in the evidence to a committee sitting on something else.

None has ever been drafted as a bill. None has ever been adopted by a party. None has ever been given time. The office is not defended against reform so much as never reached by it, because the days on which a ministry has parliamentary time to spare are not the days on which anybody is thinking about who would take the chair if the Speaker had a stroke.

After September 2028 the Regency Act is being discussed again, and the objection now being made is not to the Speaker’s membership of the five but to the Prime Minister’s. Whether anything comes of it is unknown, and the Realm’s record on this subject is not encouraging.

The Territory of Loreto

The Territory of Loreto returns five members to the House of Commons and is not a polity. They are members like any other, they vote on everything, and the chair has no special function in respect of them.

The question that will not stay settled is whether they should have more as the Territory’s population grows, and it was to that question that Considine convened a Speaker’s Conference in the last Parliament. The conference has not met since the dissolution.

Kelly has not reconvened it. His wife, Gabrielle Giffords, the Lord Marcher of Arizona, has been proposed as Loreto’s Governor-Palatine on a second commission, a proposal requiring the concurrence of the federal ministry. A Speaker can leave the chair for an item of business. A Speaker cannot leave a conference he is supposed to chair and have it continue, because the conference is the chair.

So it sits unconvened, which is not a ruling and has the effect of one.

The roll of Speakers

Failings

There is no arrangement for a Speaker who cannot act. The deputies hold delegated authority and cannot exercise it when there is nobody to delegate, which is why the Commons in 1943 had to improvise something its own Clerk would not advise. The failure was visible, it was survived, and it produced no statute, no committee report and no proposal of any kind in the eighty-five years since. The same hole is open now in a second form, because a Speaker who must leave the chair for a class of business has nobody with independent standing to hand it to. The Realm has had two clear warnings and has acted on neither.

The impartiality of the chair is a convention and could be broken. Nothing in statute or standing orders prevents a Speaker from doing what Clay did. There is no mechanism of removal, no motion has ever been moved, and the honest description of the safeguard is that everybody would be extremely annoyed. That has been enough for a century and a half and is not a rule.

A Commons officer holds a statutory power over the Crown that nobody debated. The Speaker’s place among the five of the Regency Act passed without objection in 1811 and has never been examined since. It was used for the first time in 2028 by a man who learned he had it from the Clerk, in a routine briefing, a fortnight earlier. An office whose entire modern justification is that it has no opinions can determine whether the King reigns.

The chair silences a constituency. For the length of a Parliament, the electors of the Speaker’s seat have a member who cannot vote for them. The Realm’s answer is that the casework continues, which is true and is not the same thing.

And the office has been recruited from almost nowhere. Of the thirty-five, twenty-six were lawyers. The old thirteen have supplied all but three, the exceptions being one Speaker from California, one from Cascadia and the incumbent from the March of Arizona. There has never been a Speaker from a compact nation and never an Indigenous Speaker. A Louisianais member was nominated once, in the 1970s, and lost, and the objection was never stated aloud. Kelly is the first serving officer of the armed forces to hold the chair and only the fourth holder who was not a lawyer.

Assessment

The Speakership is a smaller office than it looks and a stranger one than it sounds.

Most of what it does is arithmetic and timekeeping. It decides who speaks and for how long, whether an amendment may be moved, whether a bill is what its promoters say it is, and when the House may go home. It cannot legislate, cannot direct a minister, cannot choose a government and cannot vote. It has been shedding power continuously since 1816 and has never once got any back, and the one thing it has gained in two centuries, the statutory duty of 1811, it gained by being included in a list.

What the office is for is best seen in the moments when it is used, and those moments have a pattern. The chair holds the floor for whoever is losing. It grants the urgent question the ministry does not want answered. It casts for further debate rather than for a decision. It admits to the bar a Prime Minister the Commons cannot otherwise reach. It rules the wrecking amendments inadmissible and lets the reform survive committee. It protects the member naming the water holders, reluctantly, and would protect him if it disliked him more.

That is the whole of impartiality, properly understood. Not neutrality, which is an attitude, but a standing disposition to prevent the side with the numbers from using them to close a question before it has been argued. A chair that did nothing else would be doing the job.

Which is why the two great failures in the office’s record are failures of absence rather than of conduct. In 1943 the House needed somebody to hold the floor and there was nobody, so it invented a man on the spot and the Realm now says he was the best Speaker it ever had, although he was never Speaker. In 2028 the House has a Speaker who cannot preside over one class of business and nobody who can preside in his place.

The office has survived Clay, a war, a stroke, a scandal and a King in a hospital bed. It has not yet answered the simplest question anybody has ever asked about it, which is who takes the chair when the Speaker cannot.

Trivia

See also

• Parliament
• Mark Kelly
• Henry Clay
• The Charter of Union
• The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859
• The Crown in Right
• The Governor-General
• The Prime Minister
• Caleb Whitlock
• George C. Marshall
• George III
• Kittyhawk
• Elections and constituencies

Categories

• Institutions
• Politics and government
• The Crown and Parliament