Three cheers...

For John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, who said during a visit to New Zealand that the Mother of Parliaments over which he presides is “unfit for the 21st century” and that ministers exercise “astonishingly arrogant control over it”. Mr Bercow has never been liked by the Conservative party and his comments will probably be ignored but he is right to draw attention to the creaking mechanism of the Commons which is too often defended on the grounds that it maintains tradition.