“It is shameful!” Lindsay Hoyle was furious. Spitting mad. Splenetic. His rag? It was lost. The minister’s arse? He was getting medieval on it. “It is appalling treatment!” The Speaker of the Commons likes to have his statements prepared in advance, and he was clutching pages of notes laying bare his immense displeasure, like an incensed driver who has finally got to the front of the queue to complain about an unjust parking fine. At any moment, it seemed he might reach down and start pulling supporting evidence from a Sainsbury’s Bag for Life.
The specific cause of his anger was the government’s screeching u-turn on using gas from the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. Not the decision itself –— others were dealing with that — but the fact that it had been reported everywhere before being announced in Parliament. Hoyle has for years been fighting to get ministers to stop doing this, without any noticeable effect. Now he was both mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.