Legg letters: Speaker couldn’t stop the ‘Hutton effect’

Ann Widdecombe was having a bit of a go at the Speaker, John Bercow, yesterday for rolling over and not standing up for MPs’ rights against Sir ThomasLegg.

I’m told that Speaker Bercow twice tried to persuade Sir Thomas to drop the retrospective elements, constructing caps for spending on gardening and cleaning second homes when they never existed before.

Sir Thomas, I understand, said his own reputation was at stake. In the end, after two attempts, the Speaker decided that Sir Thomas was not budging.

Some members of the Members’ Estimates Committee wanted to vote the Legg idea down but the Speaker and others won the day and collectively they decided they had to let an independent auditor make an independent decision.

Some MPs are calling Sir Thomas’s insistence on standing his ground the “Hutton effect.”

An individual takes over an inquiry and gets tough because he doesn’t want what happened to Lord Hutton of David Kelly/Iraq Inquiry fame to happen to him or her.

Some of the headlines following Hutton’s report: “A stain on the truth by Lord Whitewash” (Daily Mail), “Hutton a whitewash say 56 per cent” (Telegraph), “Whitewash? The Hutton report” (a special issue of The Independent).

UPDATE: Apologies. I hear Speaker Bercow met Sir Thomas once, face to face, to put the case against cash limits on gardening and cleaning – he had, I am told, already accepted Sir Thomas wasn’t budging on retrospective limits.

Related: Some Legg letters are still unopened