By: Barry Soper | Friday, August 03, 2012 6:05 AM

The job's ranked the second most powerful in the country in the political pecking order but it usually goes to someone who doesn't quite fit.

It's Parliament's Speaker and the current incumbent Lockjaw Smith essentially got the job, like many of his predecessors, because he blotted his copybook.

The ever so polite Locky had a rush of blood to his fingertips when he was spokesman for immigration for The Tories in the leadup to the 2008 election, suggesting Asians make good vineyard workers because their hands are smaller which means they can access the grapes with greater ease.

Now it may have made sense to some but it was so politically incorrect that it made his political master cringe. A job in Cabinet was seen as being out of the question so he was offered the job of being the father bear of Parliament's pit and in the absence of any better offer he accepted.

He's a mild manner man in the extreme and few thought he'd have the toughness to exert his authority over the grizzlies but he's done so with aplomb, even tranquillizing Luigi Peters on the odd occasion.

But like all Parliamentary Father Bears his time is nigh and like his predecessor Jonathon Hunt he's off next year to do his diplomatic best on the cocktail circuit in London. So the search is on for the next leader of the grizzlies, someone they'd like to move out of the ministry and into the mayhem.

There was talk around the traps about the man who's made a career of verbosity, Motormouth Maurice Williamson. It seems that he hasn't transgressed enough to be anointed by the mace which seems to have settled on a man who's done little to upset the apple cart, David Carter.

The closest this mild mannered man's come to foot in mouth is being the agriculture minister.

But State Homie John Key who makes the decision has admitted it's imminently possible that Carter could become the bear pit's barker.

Carter's being coy saying he'll seriously consider any approach if it happens.

Watch this space!