Vote early, vote often

Well. A general election. Whitehall and Westminster are usually the worst places to try to keep a secret, but, to her credit, the Prime Minister seems to have pulled it off this time. Only hours before she strode out into Downing Street, Guido Fawkes was speculating that the statement might be about the imposition of direct rule in Northern Ireland, or the PM stepping down on health grounds. Genuinely, it seems to have been a surprise. It certainly was to me.

The fact of an early election is not really so much of a surprise. The Conservatives are leagues ahead in the opinion polls – the one I saw most recently gave them a 21-point advantage – and the Labour Party is in what, out of respect for private grief, we shall politely call disarray. In addition, Mrs May does not have that nebulous thing called a “mandate”, unknown to the constitution and to old buffers like me, but which people do seem to harp on about. So an early election makes sense. The chances are that the Conservatives will win, and win handsomely, and then the PM can forget about the grubby business of electioneering for another five years and concentrate on delivering a red, white and blue Brexit.

But the manner and the timing are a surprise. The logical time would have been last autumn, flush from her coronation as party leader, and with the Labour Party going through its own divisive leadership election. Moreover, the evidence is – I stress I do not know her personally, and have only ever encountered her in the division lobbies of the House of Commons – that Mrs May is not a risk-taker, not a gambler, not someone who acts on gut instinct. After all, she could quite easily have sat out the Brexit negotiations safe in a (relatively modest) parliamentary majority and knowing she would not need to go to the polls until May 2020. (Parenthesis: the National Review carried a headline today, “May orders march to a June election. Arf.)

And yet here we are. Tomorrow, the House of Commons will debate a (non-amendable) motion that “there shall be a parliamentary general election” on 8 June. This will require a bit of legwork. Under the provisions of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act, a wretched piece of legislation introduced for short-term political gain, the House must vote by a two-thirds majority (and that’s two thirds of all the seats, 650, therefore 434 votes in favour) for an early election. The other mechanism is for the Government to lose a vote of confidence, but that takes longer, and, in any case, you can see the absurdity of a Government asking its backbenchers to vote against itself.

Now, the Government does not have 434 seats in the Commons. In fact, it has 330. So the ball is now in the Labour Party’s court. As the official Opposition, with 229 seats, it can allow the Government’s motion to pass, or sit on its hands and see the Government twist in the wind. Politically, I think it is inevitable that they will have to vote in favour of the early election. It is not, of course, in their interests; as I said, they are almost historically far behind in the polls, and every indication is that they will get a good shoeing in June. It may be a mortal blow to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, though the party membership seem to have drunk so deeply of the Kool Aid that he may survive. Certainly there is no obvious replacement for him who might change the party’s fortunes.

Why, then, will they vote in favour? I think because they cannot be seen to run away from a fight. No party can afford to be seen as “frit”, if I may borrow Lady Thatcher’s Lincolnshire patois. Jeremy Corbyn has said that he welcomes an early election. That may be true. It may be true for a number of reasons: it could free him from what cannot be an enjoyable stint as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition; he may be delusional enough to think that the Labour Party can win and he can start measuring up Downing Street for organic, biodegradable hemp curtains; or he may simply not care any more.

This last point works both ways. I do not know Jeremy Corbyn, though in my time as Associate Serjeant at Arms I often sat close to him in the Chamber. I do not pretend to know what makes him tick, and whether he enjoys being leader of the Labour Party. I suspect not (“I’m not sure this is a good idea, Seumas”). But he is a politician, like any other in some respects, and he must relish the opportunity to give his opinion on current affairs at any opportunity, to a wide audience. So perhaps, I don’t know, he is content to limp along as an unelectable leader, preserving his ideological purity and avoiding those messy compromises that successful politicians have to make.

In any event, the next couple of months will be interesting. It all starts tomorrow, on the floor of the House of Commons, and the story will end there when the new Parliament is sworn in. My former colleagues in the Journal Office will get to sit at the Table and scribble down the names of new and returning Members of Parliament. The question now is, how many will be on each side?