Points of Order

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for what she has said. I do not know whether there is any precedent for such advice having been issued, but my understanding is that it has not previously been issued. I said what I did in response to an earlier point of order on the basis, once more, of clerkly advice. I know that the Clerk would concur with that view, as I do.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This year will be 30 years since we first met in the final of the competition to be selected for Bristol South, and both of us have been on something of a journey since then. When you were elected as Speaker, you said you would serve for nine years. There has been the controversy of the recommendations of the Dame Laura Cox inquiry into the House of Commons, and you have been defended, particularly by two right hon. Opposition Members, on the importance of your being sustained in position beyond the nine years in order to oversee the discussions and denouement of the Brexit issue.

The uncomfortable conclusion, Mr Speaker, given the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and the implications of the precedent that you have set with this ruling today, is that many of us will now have an unshakeable conviction that the referee of our affairs, not least because you made public your opinion and your vote on the issue of Brexit, is no longer neutral. I just invite you to reflect on the conclusion that many of us inevitably will have come to.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of view. He is quite right that we met, I think, in the anteroom of the Bristol Conservative Association headquarters at 5 Westfield Park, Redland, Bristol in July 1989, so we have known each other for a long time and I take in a perfectly good spirit what the hon. Gentleman has said.

I have explained in response to previous points of order and adduced evidence in support of my argument, including that proffered by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), that I have always done my conscientious best to champion the rights of Members wishing to push their particular point of view on a range of issues and, perhaps most strikingly, on this issue. That is what the record shows. I have always been scrupulously fair to Brexiteers and remainers alike, as I have always been to people of different opinions on a miscellany of other issues. That has been the case, it is the case and it will continue to be the case.

As for the other point that the hon. Gentleman made, he will know that I was re-elected unanimously by this House on, I think, 13 June 2017, for the Parliament. If I have a statement on that matter to make, I would of course make it to the House first. I think that most people would accept that that is entirely reasonable.