Chris

Seems fair enough. Mr Speaker and his allies have played fast and loose with convention often enough over the last few months. They should have realised the chickens would come home to roost eventually. When you work in a system that is governed so extensively by convention, then you can’t afford to try to pick and choose the conventions you respect and the ones you’re prepared to bend or break to suit your agenda. There is no written statute that compels Her Majesty’s Prime Minister to resign following a lost no confidence vote; choosing instead to remain PM until after the outcome of a general election may not have the same weight of convention behind it, but then we’ve been led to believe convention is quite flexible, especially when it’s inconvenient.

I think the reality is, there is going to have to be a general election right after Brexit anyway. Bojo’s Commons majority is barely workable as it is and might be expected to vanish well before 2022. With the Brexit Party neutralised and the possibility of some of the pro-EU uber-rebels getting deselected, it’s as good a time as any for him to go all in.

It would appear that’s the plan anyway. His grand tour of the UK followed by NHS spending announcements looks suspiciously like the opening salvo of an election campaign.