Three Women MPs Elected New Deputy Speakers

Caroline Nokes, Judith Cummins and Nus Ghani were elected as deputy speakers of the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon.

The three candidates, who will support House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, were elected by MPs from a field of eight candidates. 

Cummins and Sharon Hodgson put themselves forward as candidates for Labour, while for the Tories Ghani, Nokes, Karen Bradley, Sir Roger Gale, Helen Grant and Wendy Morton joined the race.

Nokes, the Tory MP for Romsey and Southampton North, has been chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee for four years, on the Speaker’s panel of chairs since 2019 and in the Commons for the past 14 years.

Improving the culture of Westminster was her priority during the campaign. “With 41 per cent of Parliament being women this time, that gives us an opportunity to address some of the thorny cultural issues,” she told PoliticsHome. 

Nokes wanted MPs’ bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct training to be mandatory and have the team of speakers work with party whips to create an “absolutely explicit behavioural code and a method of dealing with infringement”.

Ghani, a former minister, is the first ethnic minority MP to sit in the Speakers chair.

She said she was inspired by the late Betty Boothroyd, the first female Commons Speaker, to run for the role. But being sanctioned by China and Russia – for condemning both states’ human rights abuses – demonstrated to her that every MP should be able to go about their business “without fear or favour”. Ensuring this, she says, would be her top priority if elected.

Ghani has been the subject of repeated hacking attempts by foreign states. Just before the election, she was hacked again by Russia.

While Ghani does not want to “jump the gun” on