For the last five years, I’ve been trying to get people interested in the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. No, don’t sidle away. Honestly, this is The Spectator. Aren’t you meant to be into this sort of thing?
It’s not as though we’re on a date, for God’s sake. It’s not like we’re in a restaurant and the starter has just come, and I’m droning on about the threshold for a vote of no confidence, and you’re draining your third huge glass of red and thinking, ‘This guy looked waaaay more fun on Tinder. Next time I go to the loo I’m climbing out the window.’ That’s not how it is. No it isn’t. Pay attention.
The thing is, we’re living in the past. We were even living in the past in the past, by which I mean a more distant past, in a past that has only just… gone… past. Hell, you’re drifting off, aren’t you? Right. Look. For the past five years, whenever the coalition has looked a bit wobbly, people have said, ‘Oooh, if the government collapses, we’ll have an election!’ and they’ve been wrong. And now, today, as we gaze at the spectre of an utterly hung parliament — a ‘well-hung parliament’, I might call it, if I felt you’d stopped concentrating — people are making the same mistake. They’re thinking that another coalition will form, and that we’ll be back at the polls if it crumbles. Or that a minority government will limp on until such time as it no longer can. And then off to the country they will go.
No. No. Or at least, probably not. That was how it used to work. You’re the PM, you’re struggling in the Commons, you want a less wobbly life, it’s 1974, fine.
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