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We don't know, so let's guess

Wednesday, 15th August 2007

Daniel Finkelstein has managed to come up with a wonderfully rich prospect for pointless speculation:

When to call an election is one problem, but here's another - when do you uncall an election?
Gordon Brown will want to keep the option of an Autumn election as long as he can. But the longer he keeps it open, the more difficult it will be to call it off.
He doesn't want the media to become so convinced that he is about to fire the starting gun that everyone is disappointed when he doesn't. It's a tricky problem.
With a bit of luck I should be able to start a whole new type of pointless speculation - what is the timetable and the method for calling the whole thing off?

So let's have spme of that pointless speculation in the comments, here. When will he signal that there won't be an autumn election? And, more interestingly, perhaps, how and where will he give that signal?

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David Boothroyd

August 16th, 2007 12:23pm

How about going to the TUC and singing an old Vesta Victoria song (then misattributing it to Marie Lloyd)? It worked before! Seriously, there's never a good way to call off an election. In late 1991 there was speculation that John Major would go; when it was decided not to, he had his press secretary phone selected lobby hacks. This got good coverage in the select few who got the tipoff, and abysmal coverage in all the others. One of the best ways was Harold Wilson who had speculation about calling an election in October 1965 during the Conservative Party conference. Wilson suddenly announced he was seeing the Queen at Balmoral, causing utter panic among the Conservatives; then after the Royal audience, he explained that it was about Rhodesia instead.