One of the most frequent and least productive guessing-games being played just now is the “when are we going to have an election?” game.
This is a very British pastime. You are no more likely to find someone in most other European countries engaging in it than you are to find them baking Yorkshire puddings or singing Rule Britannia. On the continent, elections come and go with clockwork regularity, according to pre-ordained schedules.
But not here. We have organised our electoral cycles with all the irregularity and unpredictability of the weather on an English summer’s day.
Nowhere does this provide a topic of conversation more than in Westminster itself. With around 90 days to go before the most likely date for the next election, speculation has reached fever pitch – and rumours and conspiracy theories abound. Has minister X unconsciously confirmed 6 May? Or is this a deep-laid plot to throw us all off the scent? The more this all goes on, the more conscious I become of the odd spectacle that it must present to the rest of the world.
Here we are, with a thundering great deficit and a parliament that is, by any standards, well past its sell-by date. But, instead of moving sure-footedly into an election which will deliver a new parliament, we are asking our financiers to bear with us as our democracy stumbles around in search of a date at which to renew itself.
Looking back, it is genuinely puzzling why our ancestors decided to bequeath us a Quinquennial Act that limited the maximum duration of a parliament, but did not define the normal duration.
Of course, in a system like ours, where the government depends for its existence on the ability to command a majority in the House of Commons, there has to be provision for the dissolution of parliament and a new election if a government loses a confidence vote in the House. But it would certainly have been possible to combine an escape route of that kind with an otherwise settled rhythm of elections at five-yearly or four-yearly intervals.
So it remains a mystery why, when the Quinquennial Act was being introduced, our predecessors did not even discuss the possibility of a regular cycle.
I rather think that, if they had been forced to limp through the last few months, they might have come to a different conclusion.