🚨Speaker’s lavish foreign trips and convention-breaking vote choices leave neutrality claims looking threadbare. Former Labour MP Sir Lindsay Hoyle has billed taxpayers well over a quarter of a million pounds for business-class flights and five-star hotels since becoming Commons Speaker—never economy, with bills that include roughly £40,000 for an Australia trip, nearly £23,000 on a Cayman Islands stay at £679 a night, and chauffeur-driven cars in Los Angeles—while, in February 2024, he overrode the Clerk’s explicit advice and long-standing convention on an SNP opposition day to let a Labour amendment kill the original Gaza ceasefire motion outright. The chamber descended into chaos, with government and SNP walkouts plus more than fifty MPs signing no-confidence motions, after which Hoyle admitted the episode was a “shambles.” He keeps the robes, the official apartment, and the flights; everyone else gets the silence and the invoices. If the Speaker can shred centuries of procedure to protect one party and then charge the public for luxury travel without real consequence, what is left of the pretence that the chair stands above politics?