Lindsay Hoyle: “Westminster is a tinderbox ready to explode”

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Chorley since 1997. He was elected as Chairman of Ways and Means and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons in a secret ballot on 8 June 2010. Photographed at the Palace of Westminster.

Nothing captures Westminster’s imagination like a contest for a job opening that doesn’t yet exist. Just ask any of the two-dozen Tories with designs on Downing Street. Or, for that matter, the gaggle of backbenchers who, with varying degrees of tact and subtlety, are pitching for the Speaker’s chair. With the divisive John Bercow expected to stand down this summer – though nobody is quite sure when – the race to succeed him is already well under way.

That is unless you ask Lindsay Hoyle, the Labour MP and bookmakers’ favourite. “I’m very clear,” he told me when we met in his Commons office, not far from the chair some think he will soon call his own, “that there is no vacancy.”