In two short minutes, Lindsay Hoyle made himself a career’s worth of enemies

The house speaker drew the ire of both the Tories and the SNP with his conduct at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, writes Joe Murphy – but what did it mean for the Gaza debate?

House speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle announced that he would allow a Labour amendment to a Scottish National Party motion on an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Gaza (PA Wire)

Fists clenched, eyes bulging, shouts of “shame” and “disgrace”, MPs waving their arms in fury… you would have to go back to the darkest days of the Brexit battles in 2019 to recall similar scenes after a speaker’s ruling.

But it was not spiky former chair John Bercow who drew the howls of outrage this afternoon. It was Lindsay Hoyle, his genial, cuddly and hard-to-dislike successor – the man who was chosen precisely because he embodied the very opposite traits of Bercow.

Sir Lindsay had just announced that he would allow a Labour amendment to a Scottish National Party motion on an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, even though the day’s debate had been allocated to the SNP. Behind the arcane parliamentary procedures, the point was that he had just let Keir Starmer off a mighty big hook.