We May be heading for another election
I’ve covered a dozen general elections, which was fine by me when they were only every four or five years. Now polls are like buses. There’ll be another along in a moment – one in 2015, the EU referendum the following year and Theresa May’s desperate ballot last June.
So take it from an old hand that the way the PM is trying to sell her Brexit deal across the country feels very much like an election campaign.
In 10 days she will lose the Commons meaningful vote.
She knows it, yet to keep galloping towards the guns means she’s either leading the charge of the light-headed brigade or she’s got something up her sleeve.
And if she’s selling her deal to ordinary voters – rather than spending time picking off individual MPs who actually have a vote – then there might be general election plans up that sleeve.
A dozen stale, mostly male and all pale Brexiters, including Iain Duncan Smith and Boris Johnson, seem to have also clocked this.
So on Tuesday they put their names forward for the Conservative Party’s Parliamentary Assessment Board.
I know, it sounds a bit dull for Boris. But it’s a key power base. This is the body which chooses candidates to become MPs.
LIFEJACKET
And if IDS and Boris are suddenly involved because Mrs May is drowning, you can bet your lifejacket they’re plotting to mould the next intake of Tory MPs in their own Brexiteer image.
That the PM is thinking of ignoring the will of Parliament and appealing to us to back her deal in a general election appals MPs. Many Tories vowed they would never let her lead them into another election after last year’s disaster. Plans were already in place for a leadership contest should she threaten one.
Now they fear she will put a general election motion before the Commons if she loses the meaningful vote.
She is calculating that once she gets the backing of two-thirds of MPs needed to launch the election bandwagon, it will start rolling before anyone can challenge her. We are heading for a farce of The Thick of It proportions.
Tory rebels tell me they will not be scared off and will hold a leadership contest in parallel with the election campaign.
You can’t do that, I told them. The election would be cancelled.
Yes, we can, and no it wouldn’t, they said – an election wouldn’t be abandoned if a party leader snuffed it. A temp would stand in.
They even have a slogan which will sound familiar to Mrs May from her Bluffer’s Guide to Brexit.
No leader is better than a bad leader.
Tory rebels to seek new leader as Britain goes to the polls The TUC is worried that British firms might follow US ones in microchipping staff. Business minister Kelly Tolhurst says that’s most probably illegal under health and safety and data protection laws. Phew. Microchips are for cats. If bosses got away with this, next thing you know they’d have us all neutered.