TOM CLARK
“Iadmit that I wasn’t on top of the British parliament’s 17th-century procedural rules,” Angela Merkel confessed in March. The woman who at that moment probably held more sway over the fate of our nation than anyone else outside it—and possibly inside it too—was being sardonic. She knew perfectly well that neither the British people, their MPs or indeed their prime minister were familiar with the venerable precedents which, with great theatricality, the speaker John Bercow had wielded the previous day to scupper the third “meaningful vote,” which Theresa May had been banking on to finally pass her derided Brexit deal.
Standing up from his great green chair, in his long black robe, the speaker told a stunned House of Commons that under a principle established in 1604—and then reaffirmed most “notably” in 1864, 1870, 1882, 1891 and 1912—May’s plan to grind the House into submission in successive votes would not be “orderly.” And, as a result, it would not be happening, at least until something else changed.