Will Eton win the Speaker election?

The Speaker election on Monday could be a very drawn out process.

It all depends how many potential candidates get enough nominations to become full candidates by Monday at 10.30am.

After all the candidates have spoken there will be 30 minutes for voting followed by 1 hour for counting.

At the end of that counting candidates are given 10 minutes “make your mind up time” to decide whether their support is so small they should withdraw.

The ballot papers can then be printed for the next round.

While the printing goes on MPs who want to stop the front-runner, assumed to be John Bercow with big Labour support, must decide who is the candidate with the best chance of beating him.

At the moment that would look like being Sir George Young.

Though Sir George has some very respected Labour MPs backing him, many can’t bring themselves to back an Etonian baronet when an Etonian son-in-law of a baronet could be Prime Minister soon and another Etonian is installed as London Mayor.

In theory the process could go on for many hours if lots of candidates get over the threshold of 5 per cent and only one candidate drops out at a time. But the chances are the field will have thinned out by Monday and will thin out considerably after the first round of voting.

Clerks are hoping that MPs can sort the whole thing out in two rounds of voting – the first to get more than 50 per cent of the vote wins. That could mean the result coming somewhere around 7.30pm on Monday.

But this is the first time this contest has been done by secret ballot and nobody’s ruling out chaos and confusion on the night.