MPs lavish praise on House Speaker forced to resign

WHAT a difference a month makes.

A few weeks ago, British MPs were queuing up, at the height of the parliamentary expenses row, to tell Speaker Michael Martin to his face that he should resign. He was, they said, part of the problem. Soon afterwards, Martin duly obliged by announcing, in a statement lasting a full 13 seconds, that he would quit.

Yesterday, the contrast could not have been starker. MPs, from the Prime Minister downwards, spent some 90 minutes paying the most fulsome tributes to the “kind, generous, decent” man that some of them had forced out of office.