General election: Tories to break historic convention and stand candidate against Speaker John Bercow Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom said: ‘Bring it on, I say, and give us back an impartial Speaker’

The Conservative Party plans to stand a candidate against Speaker John Bercow in an upcoming general election, according to Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, she accused Mr Bercow of a “flagrant abuse” after allowing MPs to vote on taking control of the parliamentary agenda from the Government.

Ms Leadsom, an ardent Brexit supporter, said the Speaker had “failed” when he made the decision.

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“In allowing MPs to use Standing Order No24… as a route to taking over the Parliamentary timetable and giving power to the Opposition, the Speaker hasn’t just bent the rules, he has broken them. So it is right that the Conservatives will recognise this fact at the next General Election by standing our candidate against him in Buckingham.”

Standing order

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The standing order is traditionally used to trigger emergency debates and take over the Parliamentary timetable. Mr Bercow’s decision to allow this enabled the opposition to pass a law blocking a no-deal Brexit , which Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said has undermined his Brexit strategy.

The bill compels Mr Johnson to ask for an extension should a deal not be in place by 19 October, postponing the deadline until the end of January 2020.

Ms Leadsom wrote in the Mail on Sunday: “What we saw on Tuesday was a flagrant abuse of this process. The Standing Order No. 24 that the Opposition proposed wasn’t appropriate for a Motion. It was intended to ram through legislation for purely political motives.”

“It ignores the Government’s right to govern, abuses emergency debates and in this case has put EU negotiations into the hands of the Opposition. It acts in complete disregard to the will of the people – not just on Brexit, but on whom they have chosen to govern them.”

She said of a general election: “Bring it on, I say, and give us back an impartial Speaker.”

Constitutional outrage

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Mr Bercow had previously branded the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue Parliament a “constitutional outrage” and told an audience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland that he would fight any attempt by Mr Johnson to suspend Parliament.

“We cannot have a situation in which Parliament is shut down – we are a democratic society. Parliament will be heard and nobody is going to get away, as far as I am concerned, with stopping that happening.”

In May last year he apologised after claims he called Ms Leadsom a “stupid woman”.

Mr Bercow became Speaker in 2009 and previously faced a challenged seat in his Buckingham constituency when Nigel Farage ran against him as a Ukip candidate in the 2010 election.