Free Republic

"The tradition for most of my lifetime has been that the speaker is not a player in political debates — if he was doing his job well then you wouldn't notice him," said Jack Simson Caird, a former constitutional law expert in the House of Commons Library. "John Bercow has challenged that idea." Bercow, 56, became a Conservative Party lawmaker in 1997 but was forced to renounce this affiliation when elected speaker 12 years later. It's a job older than the United Kingdom itself, stretching back more than six centuries to 1377. Bercow is the 157th person to occupy the...