Well, it’s typical, isn’t it. Rather similar to the Azhar Ali incident, no sooner had I blogged about the chatter over a May election than Rishi Sunak had taken to the airwaves to rule it out. I think technically he’s only ruled out an election on the same day as the locals, so theoretically other dates in the spring remain possible. But much more likely now is the autumn, which will mean an unusual juxtaposition between our own election and the US presidential election.
One thing that shouldn’t go without note is that when the current parliament and government were elected in December 2019, the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was still in force, and 2nd May 2024 was thus fixed in law as the date of the following general election. Voters were therefore choosing who they wanted to govern them until that date, but were expressing no view at all about what should happen thereafter. It was well after the election that parliament voted to give the Prime Minister the power to extend his own term of office by up to eight months, and for the first time we now know for sure that he intends to take advantage of that power. Which means that from 3rd May onwards, the government will owe its presence in office not to the will of the people but to the will of itself.
In peacetime, that is uncharted territory. This is the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in Venezuela or Myanmar, not in an established Western European democracy. Why it hasn’t attracted more comment is beyond me.
