Until 8.30pm on Monday night, I was Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Buckingham. After John Bercow’s deserved elevation to the position of Speaker, I’m now short of a candidacy – thanks to the convention that the major parties don’t contest the Speaker’s re-election!

Far more importantly, though, the Commons has got someone in the chair who was the most reform-minded of the candidates (with the exception of Parmjit Dhanda, who writes elsewhere on the site today and deserved more support than he received), who had the most comprehensive programme and who has got the youth – and gumption – to see the necessary changes through.

Of course, Speaker Bercow’s first and most pleasant duty is to referee the debate on the floor of the House and to make sure that business is dealt with briskly but comprehensively. Backbenchers must get more opportunities both to scrutinise the executive and to initiate debates themselves. Happily, when he took the chair for the first time on Tuesday, Bercow laid the law down to MPs on the length of their questions (and to ministers on the need for brief replies), giving more members the chance to weigh in; and he has already stated that greater use must be made of procedures such as urgent questions and topical debates, which it is in the Speaker’s gift to grant.

Bercow has also promised to set up a Business Committee, taking the power to arrange the Commons’ agenda out of the hands of the government and placing it in the hands of ordinary members; and he wants to end the scandal of vast chunks of legislation becoming law without being discussed in the Commons. Both of these reforms will be welcome as parliament reasserts itself against an over-mighty executive.

We all know, however, that the Speaker’s writ must run further than the four walls of the chamber – which is why Bercow was the best choice for the job. He has said that he will be “a Speaker and a Listener”, explaining the work of the House to the public and acting as an ambassador for parliament.

This is sorely needed. Anyone who knocked on doors for the June elections will have encountered the hostility of voters infuriated by the expenses scandal. That discredited system needs to be put right and Bercow must help lead that change.

But the case also needs to be made that, as Bercow put it in his acceptance speech, “the vast majority of Members are upright, decent, honourable people who have come into politics not to feather their nests, but because they have heeded the call of public service”.

It’s crucial that we as a nation move past the understandable anger about expenses and get back to debating the issues we’re confronted with. Rarely in the past century has ‘Politics’ with a capital ‘P’ ever been so important. Politicians had to act to save the banks from collapse and to ensure that no saver lost out; and the problems which we face – the recession, tackling youth crime, climate change, ending poverty – simply can’t be done without, at the very least, government giving things a hefty shove in the right direction.

Naturally, the Tories are on the wrong side of that argument – just as they’ve been on the wrong side of the debate over the Bercow Speakership. Their bizarre behaviour – from flailing around trying to get an ‘Anyone but Bercow’ campaign together to Nadine Dorries’ disgraceful comments about Bercow’s Labour-supporting wife, Sally – showed that, in Parmjit Dhanda’s words, they just don’t “get it”. It’s true that Bercow made some on the Tory benches uncomfortable by doing such heinous things as suggesting that Section 28 may not be the best idea and that the international development budget really shouldn’t be cut. But a truly progressive Conservative party would have recognised that on both those issues, Bercow was ahead of the game. The fact that they didn’t is as salient a commentary on David Cameron’s supposedly ‘modernised’ Tories as any policy announcement from the direction of CCHQ.

John Bercow’s elevation to the chair is a loss to the Tories – even if they choose not to realise it – and a big gain for the House. Even when I was slated to be Labour’s candidate against him, I knew that he was a man of principle and conviction; indeed, it was partly why I sought to contest the election with him in the first place.

He has a big task ahead of him. No-one can single-handedly reconnect parliament with the public. But he has the correct agenda, the good will of at least the majority of the Commons and, if the Tories can get over themselves, the time to help put things right and drag our parliament into the 21st century.