Only three sets of circumstances allow for the calling of a general election in the United Kingdom. Either five years have passed and the sitting government has run out of road, or the Prime Minister, seeking to strike at the perfect moment, goes for broke, or the government loses the confidence of the House via a motion put down by the Leader of the Opposition.
In today’s UK, none of the above apply and the country is fated to be fastened to the decaying carcass of the Tory Party until, in all likelihood, the autumn of 2024.
The prime minister who takes over from Boris Johnson after the current, long-drawn out leadership contest – let us call her Liz Truss – would have to be mad to chance her arm with things as they are. And Keir Starmer, even with the help of the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and sundry “others”, doesn’t have the numbers that would oblige the Queen to agree to a dissolution of Parliament.
And yet and yet… nothing is more certain than the fact that the British people have had their fill of the present lot and are desperate for change. Poll after poll confirms this. The Conservatives are at rock bottom and the Opposition parties are surging. The outgoing Cabinet, presided over from Slovenia, Greece, Chequers or wherever Boris Johnson happens to be on any given day, is a zombie administration and its replacement, due to be announced on 6 September, will be undead on arrival.
If an election were to be called in the autumn, the result would be a landslide victory for Keir Starmer, with or without the support of the Lib Dems. The Conservatives would be lucky to come away with more than 250 seats; the Red Wall would be rebuilt from the ground up; in Scotland, the Tories would be wiped out.
Everybody knows this. The dogs in the street know it. But Liz Truss will take to the microphone outside Number 10 in two weeks’ time as if she was Margaret Thatcher in 1979 rescuing us from the Winter of Discontent, or even Churchill taking over from Chamberlain in May 1940. She will proclaim a new dawn and a new beginning, pledging herself to work tirelessly to rescue Britain from the dark place into which it has fallen under the governments in which she loyally served without a single day’s interruption since 4 September, 2012.
Lest we forget, here is Truss’s record in government:
4 September 2012 – 15 July 2014: Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Childcare and Education
15 July 2014 – 14 July 2016: Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
14 July 2016 – 11 June 2017: Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
11 June 2017 – 24 July 2019: Chief Secretary to the Treasury
24 July 2019 – 15 September 2021: Secretary of State for Trade
15 September 2019 – to date: Foreign Secretary
During all that time, in all those jobs, what good has she done? What difference did she make? What will historians make of her contribution to education, children’s rights, justice, the environment, food supply or quality, rural affairs, fiscal policy, trade or relations with the wider world? Very little, I would suggest. Footnotes at best. She may bluster about trade deals with [fill in name of country] while trade secretary. The truth is, she rolled over existing EU deals, with only the least consequential of tweaks. As foreign secretary, her only claim is that she faithfully echoed the support for Ukraine in its war with Russia declared by Boris Johnson. Unless we include her opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol (currently in abeyance), she has as much to show on the diplomatic front as Johnson did during his notorious tenure of the office while he was busy undermining Theresa May.
At one level, Truss is the most experienced minister in the Johnson cabinet. But it is a question of never mind the quality, feel the width. The only surprise is that she didn’t run the NHS for six months or take charge of Britain’s defences for a couple of weeks in the spring of 2020. And now, having left the Foreign Office largely to its own devices for the past month, she is about to shift again, this time into the highest office in the land.
There is little point in dwelling on her many changes of mind over economic policy and what to do to help ordinary people get through the winter that is all too rapidly approaching. Her U-turns on just about every aspect of policy – including Brexit – are legion. Suffice to say, she doesn’t know what she’s saying on just about every issue that matters. She mouths slogans but lacks depth, and voters will see through her as through a glass within weeks, not months, as their desperation reaches flashpoint.
It should go without saying that an early general election would not solve Britain’s problems. Any new government taking over at the start of what promises to be a dreadful moment in history would be up against it, and Labour would be on the steepest of learning curves. It is also the case that not all the issues – most obviously the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis – were the responsibility of the Cameron, May or Johnson governments. But there is no issue other than Ukraine itself that has not been made worse in recent years by contact with the Tories. They have failed the British people and it is time they were gone. At least Labour under Starmer would represent clean hands and a fresh approach.
Unfortunately, unless Truss takes leaves of her senses and comes to believe her own propaganda, there is no chance of that. Instead, Britain will continue to go downhill fast in the course of the next two years, so that when Labour is finally brought in to clear up the mess, the task will be twice as hard.
The speech by Neil Kinnock in 1983, delivered just prior to the re-election of Thatcher, in which the then Labour leader laid out the consequences, as he saw them, of prolonged Tory governance, were, it turns out, not so much wrong as premature. Nearly 40 years on, they have an almost eerie resonance:
“I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.”
Who could possibly disagree with such a judgment today?