Speaker Bercow breaks the rules

New Commons Speaker John Bercow came to the chair full of reformist zeal, determined to put Parliament back at the centre of British political life. Just a few days later and his first reform lies in tatters after he appears to have breached it himself.

One of the first things he did after his election was to warn ministers he would no longer put up with them making announcements in the media before telling MPs their proposals in the Commons.

The practice undermined Parliament and he was there, he suggested, to clean up the place and stop such abuses of convention. There were even thinly veiled hints he was prepared to act against any such misbehaving ministers.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. Speaker Bercow was to announce the next phase of his reforms with a call for his deputies to be elected. More than half an hour before he got to his feet in the Commons to deliver this reform, full details of his statement appeared on the BBC News website.

It led Tory Simon Burns to demand a leak inquiry. For the rest of Westminster, this apparent breaking of the Speaker's ruling by either the Speaker himself or someone in his immediate circle brought wry smiles and the suggestion this was always going to end in tears.

The problem is that, well-intentioned as the original plea might have been, it was never going to work. And it wasn't even original. Just about every Speaker in recent memory has made a similar plea only to watch it being comprehensively ignored.

Quite simply, ministers are not daft. They don't go onto the Today programme and announce their latest policy with bells and whistles. What they do do, however, is respond to 'speculation' or 'leaks' of their policy which just happen to have appeared in the media which they then feel duty bound to respond to.

So, they go onto the Today programme and insist they are not going to announce policy there before telling the Commons, but then happily go on to do just that by dealing with the so-called speculation. Needless to say, the leaks have usually come from their own advisers or colleagues and, more often than not, have been deliberately made to give the policy as much air time as possible.

So, did the Speaker leak his own statement? Perhaps not. There is another theory which suggests someone on the Government benches felt it would be a good idea to leak the Speakers' statement so he would have to drop any plans to take action against them in future for fear of being branded a hypocrite.

Or, put another way, despite all the talk of reform, it's business as usual in the Palace of Westminster.