Uneasy lies the head...
Sunak may yet be ousted while he hangs on and delays election
The Fixed Term Parliaments Act was a mess. Slipshod, selfserving constitutional change gave rise to unconsidered consequences, including the 2019 farce of a minority government trapped in office, unable to either govern or go to the country.
Thankfully, the FTPA was repealed in 2022. A happy result of its demise is the question – currently the second or third thing literally everybody asks me about – of when the Prime Minister will call the election.
Conventional wisdom dictates that Rishi Sunak will go for late autumn, for three reasons.
First, he’s miles behind in the polls. Prime ministers who are way behind don’t voluntarily put the pollsters’ expertise to the test.
Second, if he is doomed, traditionally he would want as many more months in the top job as possible, preferring to wield power and cement legacy measures before leaving.
Third, he may hope that waiting maximises the chance of the economy – and the polls – turning a corner.
These are the reasons why most MPs I speak to still expect a later – specifically November – election.
I’d add a fourth, more mundane, consideration, which is that it’s really easy to find reasons not to jump on any given day. Not today, because the headlines aren’t great. Not tomorrow, because there’s an embarrassing report on a(nother) scandalous MP coming out. Not this week, because another atrocity just happened in the Middle East, and it would seem insensitive.
While we all talk as though No 10 has a cunning plan for the election declaration, don’t underestimate the capacity for doubt and the chaos of external events to push it later and later by default. That’s the scenario that could produce a January 2025 election – TV debates over Christmas, what a delight – without anyone actually intending it.
The conventional wisdom could be right. It’s entirely possible Sunak will plump for 14 November, or even hold on right until the last moment just because he likes Downing Street and wants time to ban some more, as-yet unspecified, stuff.
But the possibility of a sudden summer election is understated.
The coming fortnight is the period of maximum risk that one might be declared. And the logic of not going to the country when every pollster agrees that voters are gagging to give you a shoeing is sound.
A lot has been learnt by the polling industry since 2015, and it’s been quite a while since any Conservative MP assured me, Downfall-style, of a secret electoral weapon that CCHQ is going to deploy to turn things around.
I gather there is debate inside Downing Street nevertheless.
The Prime Minister has a team of pollsters and electoral strategists, whose job is to assess what voters think, chief among them Isaac Levido, the sharp Australian political operator who played a major role in the tightly disciplined and highly effective 2019 campaign.
The pollsters and strategists, whose job is to assess what voters think, want late autumn, to give the best shot to capitalise on falling inflation delivering lower interest rates, rising growth, positive employment figures and improved consumer optimism.
The Prime Minister, and some of those around him, are starting to worry about a different electorate altogether: their own colleagues in the parliamentary Conservative Party. Sure, the economy might tick up by November, and voters might (a far more optimistic and contentious “might”) become more sympathetic as a result. But what use is that if Tory MPs rebel and either turf Sunak out or throw his administration into chaos with a challenge in the meantime?
It’s not impossible. The breadth and depth of unhappiness on the Tory benches is immense, and extends beyond the usual suspects.
Next week’s local elections are set to be a nightmare, with frenzied speculation about Andy Street and Ben Houchen, the two Conservative metro mayors in the battlegrounds of the West Midlands and Tees Valley respectively.
Those in Team Sunak who fear
MPs’ reaction to a local elections drubbing are therefore entertaining calling an early summer general election to head off the risk of a leadership challenge. It seems mad, but it’s being discussed.
Is the leadership threat serious? Personally, I can’t see the prospect of yet another contest doing anything other than alienating frustrated voters even more.
But it isn’t up to me – MPs mulling a guaranteed election defeat think they owe Sunak little, and reason that a further roll of the dice might be their only chance.
The other question that matters is what Sunak believes. If the risk of defenestration, or at minimum further civil war, seems sufficiently large, then he may conclude he faces a more immediate threat from his MPs than from the electorate.
There’s also self-respect. Perhaps he would rather take the chance of being ejected by the people, on his own terms, than dragged down by his colleagues.
A leadership ballot would be extremely messy, giving rise not to a clean ending but to a drawn-out grapple in the mud, from which nobody emerges either victorious or glowing.
That’s not the only risk to hanging
Frenzied speculation surrounds the futures of Tory metro mayors including Tees Valley’s Ben Houchen, which could have a bearing on the general election date on. The economic and international picture is not guaranteed to get better simply by virtue of the passage of time.
What if D:Ream were wrong, and things can’t only get better?
Finally, we should consider the degree to which holding on in Downing Street might be losing its allure. Sunak is a rationalist, economically minded manager. He likes the idea that you pull X lever, and Y happens. He believes that a logically argued point should change someone’s mind.
And yet he is in politics, a pursuit in which those things often don’t hold true, at a point electorally in which many voters have made their minds up or disengaged entirely, whatever he might do or say.
It must be incredibly frustrating and demoralising – doing everything you believe to be right, only to see none of it make a blind bit of political difference.
In such a situation, might hanging on in office actually start to feel less like a privilege and more like a cruel form of torture?
He may think he faces a more immediate threat from his MPs than from the electorate
Mark Wallace is chief executive of Total Politics Group
i@inews.co.uk