Michael Martin, the Speaker of the Commons, is to be told by senior Labour figures that he must stand down by the next general election or risk a humiliating "mess" at the end of a political career spanning three decades.
In a dramatic change of mood, after a day of heated Commons exchanges over the best way to clean up Westminister's expenses regime, ministers and senior MPs were lining up to tell the Speaker in private that he had lost the confidence of parliament.
"It is sad and it is painful," one minister, who has been a supporter of Martin, said. "But we are going to have to tell Michael that he must indicate that he will stand down at the next election or it will all dissolve into a terrible mess."
Tony McNulty, the employment minister, became the first minister to criticise the Speaker in public over the way he slapped down MPs who questioned his handling of the expenses row. "I thought he was a bit heavy-handed with Kate Hoey and Norman Baker – unusually so for him, to be fair."
The growing unease about the Speaker came as a new round of senior Labour and Tory MPs faced embarassment about their expenses in today's Daily Telegraph:
• Elliot Morley, the former Labour environment minister, claimed £16,000 in mortgage interest on his Scunthorpe constituency home for more than 18 months after paying off the loan. He has since paid back the money after admitting he made a mistake.
• Fabian Hamilton, the Labour MP for Leeds North East, declared his mother's London house as a his main residence, allowing him to claim allowances for his constituency home. Hamilton said he lived with his mother because she was gravely ill and died in 2005.
• John Maples, a deputy chairman of the Tory party, declared a room in his private members' club in Pall Mall as his main home, allowing him to claim allowances on his Oxfordshire home. Maples said he had stayed at the RAC Club for a short period in between selling and buying a London home.
Nick Brown, the chief whip, will today meet Labour MPs with questionable claims. But the week-long allegations are putting intense pressure on the Speaker who led the fight against releasing MPs' expenses.
The veteran Tory MP Richard Shepherd said he would back a motion of no confidence in Martin. "There is something very rotten at the heart of parliament," he said.
Senior government sources said Martin was expected to indicate his intention to stand down by the time of the election. One source said: "Many mainstream people believe his performances have been misjudged this week. But Labour MPs are not going to throw out a working-class guy from Glasgow. He is safe as houses in the short term. After the election? We'll see."
Martin today comes under fire on another front, accused of using an obscure legal device to block further requests for information about the work of MPs – including apparently innocuous inquiries such as one about the all-party group on the wood panel industry.
The journalist and information campaigner Heather Brooke, who led the campaign to release information about MPs' expenses, told the Guardian that the Commons authorities are using section 34 in the 2000 Freedom of Information Act to block the release of information if it is "an infringement of the privileges of either house of parliament".
The authorities said this applied in the case of the wood panel group because the request would "interfere with the functioning" of the registrar of members' interests. MPs on the group would have registered any links to the wood panel industry.
Brooke said: "They are battening down the hatches. Rather than concede, they seem to be in full defence mode. This is a last-ditch attempt to maintain this feudal culture of secrecy. It is the wood panel industry group, it's not like it is going to topple parliament as we know it, unless it is made of wood panel."
Lord Falconer, the former lord chancellor who piloted the FOI Act through the House of Lords, last night expressed surprise that it was being used to block information about the all-party wood group. "It had never occurred to me that it would apply to that sort of thing," he told the Guardian.
"But that is not to say that it might not be wide enough to cover it.
"The question of whether or not you would set up a wood panelling all-party group – you might have a discussion in which you will ask is it worthwhile. Would that infringe the privilege of the house in the sense that it would inhibit people talking whether to set up an all-party group?"
But Falconer said that it was right to block other requests from freedom of information campaigners, such as the private discussions of Commons committees. "The obvious things that would be privileged would be the deliberation of committees."
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