Is Michael Martin a scapegoat?

After a week of speculation and intense pressure over his position the Speaker of the House of Commons has decided to admit defeat and stand down.

But will Michael Martin falling on his sword absolve the entire House of Commons?

Not if the mood of the nation is anything to go by. After all, how has Martin become solely responsible for MPs' excessive expense claims?

Why should he also be solely to blame for bringing a judicial review on whether the Freedom of Information Act could be applied to MPs expenses or whether they could be exempted? Most MPs backed the move and even David Cameron had to be warned by his own party whips not to stand in the Speaker's way over the issue because of serious howlers among his own frontbench MPs on the issue.

The Speaker's role is partly ceremonial, partly administrative. He has a staff like any other manager and he monitors the rules in order to make sure they are adhered to both in the chamber and in other matters such as expenses.

But if MPs didn't break any rules - and most didn't regardless of the fact that they made excessive and in some cases down right ridiculous expense claims - then why is Mr Martin going to stand down?

Is he just a scapegoat?

Well, yes, frankly he is.

Most voters aren't really angry at the Speaker - an awful lot of them wouldn't have been able to tell you his name two weeks ago, let alone what he actually did in parliament, let's be honest. They are however, furious with their own MPs - and rightly so.

But what's Douglas Carswell's solution? He blames the Speaker of the House for the entire mess. This is nonsense.

And actually the most embarrassing and sickening aspect of yesterday's drama in the House was the string of MPs calling points of order so that they could blame the Speaker for their bad behaviour and tell him it was his fault.

It was as they were trying to tell him it was his job to make them act responsibly and honourably!

And Carswell had the cheek to say the Speaker lacked moral authority. From almost any MP in the House of Commons at the moment surely that's hypocrisy of the grandest scale!

Martin is no doubt guilty of blocking some reforms but it's not as if the MPs were pushing for those reforms themselves very hard.

The crunch point however was last week when he turned on backbenchers including Norman Lamb and Kate Hoey.

The moment he did this he lost the backing of MPs.

The Speaker, after all, is supposed to represent the House of Commons, that includes representing MPs, not tearing them to shreds in the House of Commons during a televised debate that then became the top story on most, if not, all national television news programmes that evening.

MPs had already suffered humiliation at the hands of the press, and if you think they won't get their revenge you're sorely mistaken, give it a year or two and there will be a tightening of privacy laws, or an attack on chequebook journalism or some other law passed to regulate journalists.

Whatever they can do to neuter the press, MPs will vote for it and journalists, as we all know, have possibly even fewer friends to call upon than MPs and will probably be powerless to prevent them.

Having been humiliated by the press MPs were unlikely to forgive the humiliation of one or two of their own at the hands of the Speaker of the House of all people - for talking to the hated individuals who had exposed their own shortcomings in the first place!

So I ask again, why is Speaker Martin going to resign? Answer: He has lost the confidence of the House of Commons so he is jumping before he is pushed. Alternatively you could look at this as a very simple case of revenge.

MPs are some of the most egotistical people on the planet and when egos that big take the kind of bashing theirs have in the last week they need someone to pick on. They can't have their own confidence dented in such a way and that's much closer to the truth of the no confidence motion that Carswell was attempting to bring forward for debate.

I'd be willing to bet money that if we could go back a week and Martin had not rebuked those backbenchers in the way that he had he would still be in office. I also bet he wishes he could as well.

Matthew West