Speaker of the House of Assembly Stanley Lowe extended a severe reverse to Premier Dr. Ewart Brown on Friday when he reversed his position on the asking of Parliamentary questions.

In doing so, he reasserted the independence of the Speaker, and therefore the legislature which he oversees, from the executive.

He deserves credit for doing so, even if he erred badly in the first instance.

Still, his statement raises even more questions than it answers about this sorry episode that began on May 27 when a statement was issued, supposedly by Mr. Lowe through the Department of Communication and Information, quoting Mr. Lowe as stating that he had agreed that the parliamentary questions on travel first tabled in Parliament before the last General Election could not be answered.

That was because all business before the House of Assembly and Senate not dealt with before Parliament is prorogued for a general election automatically "falls off" Parliament's order paper.

When the new Parliament, with newly elected members sits, it starts with a clean slate. This applies to bills, proposed regulations, motions and questions, and rightly so; new MPs cannot be held responsible for the unfinished business of their predecessors.

But there is no reason why those same bills and so forth cannot be retabled, and they often are. In the same way, there is no reason why questions which were not answered in the previous parliament - like those on Government travel - should not be put down again. The alternative would be for Government to simply avoid answering questions until they "timed out".

Mr. Lowe was wrong when he agreed to bar the questions, and in fact breached his own precedents in doing so. But to his enormous credit, when he realised he had made a mistake, he readily admitted it.

What is more troubling is that the same statement from Mr. Lowe contained a comment from Premier Dr. Ewart Brown which said: "The floor of the House is where substantive debate is supposed to occur. It is an outright rejection by the Speaker of the Opposition's time-wasting questions about travel and the like."

Mr. Lowe now says that he never approved this statement and was not even aware it had been released. And it was highly inappropriate that it should contain a comment from the Premier - the Speaker is independent of the Government for his term and this kind of joint statement suggests collusion or worse.

The story gets worse. Dr. Brown has not commented on it. The Cabinet Secretary, Marc Telemaque, said on Friday he knew nothing about it, although he should have.

Instead, he urged this newspaper to contact the press officer responsible for releasing the statement for a comment. That press officer, Nea Talbot, did her best, but was less than convincing.

That's not her fault. Ms Talbot was made a scapegoat on Friday and was wrongly hung out to dry by her seniors. Press officers do not generate statements without being instructed to do so, and they don't release them until they have been approved.

Ms Talbot does not deserve to be held responsible for this.

US President Harry S Truman famously had a sign on his Oval Office desk that said "the buck stops here". Apparently, Dr. Brown does not.