John Humphrys - May’s Snap Election: Cynical or Sensible?

April 20, 2017, 1:15 PM GMT+0

Surprises don’t come much bigger than this.

Few people, even at the centre of politics, woke up on Tuesday morning imagining that a few hours later the Prime Minister would emerge from Downing Street to announce that she wanted to call a general election in June. It’s not that the evidence suggested such an election would be suicidal - far from it - but because Mrs May herself had been so emphatic in insisting that the country did not need one. Now she says it does. Do her reasons for forcing everyone to troop back to the polling booths stand up? Is an election in the national interest or just in her party’s and her own?

Only a month ago the Prime Minister said that to call an election would be ‘self-serving’ and that what the country needed was a period of stability while the government got on with negotiating Brexit. Now she says it was ‘genuinely reluctantly’ that she changed her mind. Her reason was clear. In her statement in Downing Street she said: ‘The country is coming together but Westminster is not.’ She argued that on Brexit, Labour threatened to vote against a deal the government negotiated. She accused the Liberal Democrats of wanting to ‘grind the business of government to a standstill’; the SNP of being ready to vote against legislation to repeal Britain’s membership of the EU; and the House of Lords of vowing ‘to fight us every step of the way’. An election would put an end to all that and restore stability.

But this logic has been described as at best ‘flimsy’ and at worse the exact opposite of the truth. There is no evidence, her critics say, that the country is ‘coming together’. Opponents of Brexit continue to argue their case and look for opportunities to mitigate what they see as a coming disaster. And as for Westminster, the government has not lost a single vote in the House of Commons on Brexit and the House of Lords has fallen into line as, constitutionally, it feels it needs to. On top of all that, it is the job of oppositions to challenge and oppose a government when necessary. It’s called parliamentary democracy.

So the Prime Minister’s explanation of her sudden change of mind simply doesn’t wash with many people - especially when there is a more glaringly obvious explanation. The opinion polls. YouGov’s most recent poll gives the Tories a 21% lead over Labour. The average poll lead over the recent period is about 15%. This context gives Mrs May a probably unrepeatable opportunity to smash Labour and win a landslide majority for her party, reaffirming her as an unassailable leader of both the party and the country.

Add to this a chance to dispose of a little local difficulty: the impending outcome of police enquiries into irregular election expenditure by the Conservatives at the last general election. Those enquiries might well have led to a series of embarrassing by-elections. So, one way and another, the political case for a snap election is irresistible. In short, say her critics, for all the high-flown talk about the national interest, the calling of the election is simply a familiar piece of political cynicism to exploit an opportunity.

Yet whether or not that is true - and the doyen of psephologists, Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University, warns against casually assuming a Tory landslide - a case may also be made that an election now would help any government in the forthcoming negotiations with our erstwhile European partners over Brexit. On the face of it that might seem the opposite of the truth simply on the grounds that it wastes time, with the clock already ticking. But as the two main players on the EU side, France and Germany, themselves have elections in the spring and autumn of this year, no serious negotiation at political level will happen until these are out of the way. A June poll in Britain fits in well with that timetable.

More to the point, however, the subsequent British general election will now take place not in 2020 to 2022 and that is regarded as providing the main benefit to the Brexit negotiations. Mrs May is said to have feared that the EU would have her ‘over a barrel’ if, in trying to secure a deal by 2019 (as is required) she had to go to the country to defend it just a year later. She told the Sun that, with an election now, ‘we will be much freer’ to negotiate. What this appears to mean is that she feels she will be able to accept a transitional deal (which everyone acknowledges will be necessary between the point at which Britain formally leaves the EU in 2019 and the implementation of a final deal) that contains more vestiges of our EU membership and for longer precisely because she won’t have to go to the polls again until 2022.

In political terms, what that implies is that an election now followed by (she hopes) a bigger Tory majority will free her not only from what the Daily Mail calls the ‘saboteurs’ – not just other parties but the Remainers within her own parliamentary Conservative Party – but also from Tory Brexit hardliners on her backbenches. In short, it means she may be able to accept a ‘softer’ Brexit deal than she would have otherwise got away with.

For a prime minister who talks of a country ‘coming together’, that is a prize worth having since it would narrow the gap between the two sides of the Brexit/Remain argument, even though the extremes of both sides would stay unreconciled. If that were the outcome, the Prime Minister might well then claim that calling an election now had been in the national interest.

Nonetheless, her decision has raised plenty of eyebrows. For one thing, it seems to make a mockery of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which was intended to deprive prime ministers of the ability to call elections when it simply served their interests. It’s true that her decision is in accordance with the Act, in that she has had to get Commons’ approval (by a two-thirds vote), but since opposition parties cannot ever oppose the calling of an election, for fear of being frightened of facing the electorate, the effect just gives back to prime ministers their original power.

Perhaps more pertinently (and this may play to Mrs May’s disadvantage), calling an election now obliges the public to go through yet another, only two years after the last election and one year after the referendum. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, they’ve been trooping to the polls even more frequently. Not everyone is enthused by the idea. As Brenda, a woman doorstepped by the BBC in Bristol put it on Tuesday, when told there was to be an election: ‘You’re joking? Not another one. Oh for God’s sake, I can’t stand this. There’s too much politics going on at the moment. Why does she need to do it?’

Do you think she needs to? Do you accept Mrs May’s arguments as to why she feels she does? Do you think it is or isn’t in the national interest to have an election in June? Is it sensible or cynical? And what result do you hope will emerge?

Let us know.