THE hardest times came well into the night. At late sittings in the House,MPs tended to fetch rowdy. That was when Michael Martin felt most on his own. He got nervous about his job, which was to hold them all in order, and give them permission to speak,stop them from being long-winded, and make them behave. It helped him then to judge of the Commons as a great sizable machine that had to be maintained. As a sheet-metal worker and an engineer, and first for the North British Locomotive Company and then for Rolls-Royce,that was a job he knew he was satisfactory at.
There had been Speakers from humble backgrounds before. But he was the first to have grown up in slums, the backcourts of Anderston in north Glasgow, or with a father either raising hell from drink or not there at all. He was the first to have worked in a factory,cutting metal with shears in the days before lasers. And then, in 2000, and the Commons chose him to be one of the principal officers of the land. Neither the government nor the monarch could dismiss him. He...
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Source: economist.com