Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has lost patience with Chancellor Rishi Sunak for leaking tomorrow’s Budget and has permitted Labour to put forward an urgent question in the House of Commons this afternoon.
Bridget Phillipson, MP for Houghton and Sunderland South, will ask Sunak – whose department has been dishing out key details of tomorrow’s spending review to the media – for a statement on all the provisions that have been made public.
The statement will delay today’s business, but you cannot help but speculate as to why Hoyle is all too happy to allow the opposition to intervene.
Sunak is not forced to attend, but someone else from the Government must show up.
Yesterday, Hoyle berated the Treasury for its behaviour, claiming that past chancellors would have resigned for “riding roughshod” over members and breaking parliamentary etiquette.
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This is not the first time Boris Johnson’s administration has been given a rollocking for briefing information to lobby reporters. In November 2020, Hoyle demanded a personal apology if a minister had leaked the Prime Minister’s lockdown plan before addressing it in Parliament.
