John Bercow ‘nominated for a peerage by Jeremy Corbyn’ Mr Bercow, became the first Speaker in 230 years not to be offered a seat in the House of the Lords following his resignation

Former Commons speaker John Bercow has reportedly been nominated for a peerage by Labour.

Mr Bercow, became the first Speaker in 230 years not to be immediately offered a seat in the House of the Lords following his resignation last year, an apparent rebuke from the Prime Minister at his procedural interventions over Brexit.

However, Jeremy Corbyn has now nominated Mr Bercow alongside former Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson as well as the Labour leader’s former chief of staff Karie Murphy for a peerage, The Sunday Times reports.

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It remains unclear whether he would become a Labour peer or cross-bencher.

Remarkable move

Such a move would be remarkable given that Mr Bercow was a Tory MP, before being elevated to presiding over the main Parliamentary chamber.

A nomination for Ms Murphy could also prove controversial given her place in Labour’s anti-Semitism controversy.

The newspaper said that the trio appear on an eight-strong list of dissolution honours nominations put forward by the Labour leader, who will resign from his post in April.

Sources in the Labour party did not deny the claim and declined to comment on the report.

Tory Party Chairman James Cleverly said on Sunday: “I’m going to fall back on convention here and by convention we don’t discuss the peerages and nominations before the event. He’s a very experienced politician.”

He added: “The simple fact of the matter is the nominations process, there’s always a lot of speculation, there’s always good fun, until it actually comes out we won’t know exactly who has been put forward and your viewers are very well informed and they can speculate all on their own.”

A controversial speaker

Mr Bercow, who was first elected in 1997 as Conservative MP for Buckingham, spent a decade as Speaker, overseeing four prime mininisters.

He drew fire from a number of prominent Brexiteers and was often accused of bending parliamentary rules to thwart the UK’s departure by pro-Brexit MPs.

However, he repeatedly rebuffed the accusations, saying that he would “assert to anybody that will listen until my dying day that I have been impartial in the chair”.

Global interest in the twists and turns of Brexit made him well known far beyond Britain, with his shouts of “order” making it as far as US and Italian chat shows.