The Speaker has spoken, sort of.
He groveled a bit, 'regretting' this and that, but overall merely passed the buck.
The police were wrong, he says. Quite right. They didn't have a warrant, and the Serjeant-at-Arms didn't think to ask. So explicitly he balmes the police; implicitly he blames the Serjeant, Jill Pay, a former civil servant, appointed no doubt for reasons of political correctness. After all it's just a sinecure, isn't it, the only duties being to cart around the mace?
Is she ignorant of the symbolic significance of the mace? Is she so stupid she didn't think to as the police for their search warrant? Should not, in any case, such a search be permitted only after a resolution of the House itself?
So Mr Speaker Martin delays the inevitable by calling for a committee of enquiry. What enquiry? Does he not understand the authority of the House of Commons is supposed to possess?
I despair of the Commons. It's just an office block now, home to ambitious apparatchiks and timeservers. No wonder it's treated with comtempt.
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