At around noon on Thursday, the House of Commons was doing what it does best. The benches were packed, the exchanges were combative. The place was full of the sound and fury of adversarial politics. On all sides, MPs were engaged, not least because what was being discussed was so crucial to the lives of the millions of families they represent.
The new prime minister, Liz Truss, was just two days into the job. But that counted for nothing. The Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, conscious that few policy statements in recent years had been more important, savaged her government for failing to provide written copies of it in advance to MPs. “Rather than judging it to be deliberate, I will put it down to bad management or incompetence,” said Hoyle, brutally.
