You can tell that the mood of the public is for change with the amount of general conversation, let alone media comment speculating on the timing for the next general election, with a particular focus on May or October. However, this is to assume that there will be an election this year and it ain’t necessarily so.
Governments that are in trouble – and boy is this Conservative administration in trouble – often delay things as long as they can on the “something may turn” theory of political decision-making. The last two times this was tried was again by the Tories and was in 1992 and 1997. In the former case, John Major had replaced Margaret Thatcher as leader in the late autumn of 1990 and hung on for the full term before scaping a narrow majority in 1992.
The following election was more problematic for the Tories and has more parallels to the situation today – albeit I stick by my earlier thinking that the upcoming election is more 1979 than either of the two elections in the 1990s. What happened after 1992 was the run on the pound and subsequent ignominious exit from the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, which tried to keep the exchange rate of the pound within a range determined by the value of a basket of other European currencies. It was designed to stabilize the rate prior to eventual entry into the Euro. It did not work and speculators forced the government to leave the mechanism albeit not before wasting billions of pounds in defending the currency’s value.
Public confidence in the economic competence of the Tories never recovered despite the subsequent surefootedness of Ken Clarke as Chancellor, who handed over to the incoming Blair administration a growing economy with public finances in great shape. The electorate did not care. The parallels with public reaction to the latest budget mirror this – people no longer care what the Tories are saying. They have stopped listening. The change is on.
But it does seem that Sunak is determined to go the full term. The latest a Parliament can be dissolved for a general election is on the fifth anniversary of the day it first met, which for the current Parliament is 17 December 2024. Twenty-five working days are then allowed to enable the electoral campaign leading to a date for the next election itself of 28 January 2025.
Which seems an awfully long way away.
Why is he doing this? It has to be the ‘something will turn up’ theory. But Sunak should be careful what he wishes for. Just because something may turn up it does not mean that what turns up will be good for the Tory party. Lots of things have turned up over the last few months: the continuing chaos over Rwanda, Liz Truss going the full Trump, corruption scandals hitting the sitting MP for Blackpool, an unresolved junior doctors strike etc. For goodness sake, Lee Anderson, who but a few weeks ago was the Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party, has today defected to the brexit-cosplay Reform Party. In the meantime, polls have gone from showing the Tories on course to win a couple of hundred seats to just twenty.
So it could well be 2025 before we see the next general election. But if Sunak thinks that things can only get better then he’s singing from the wrong hymn sheet.
Related post: May Election: don’t believe the hype
