CHARLIE WHELAN: I still rue to this day Gordon Brown dithering over General Election timing
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Now that the brief experiment with fixed term parliaments is over the decision to call an election lies with just one person and that’s the Prime Minister.
Technically, of course, he or she has to make the request to the monarch but that’s just a constitutional nicety.
Twice in my lifetime the incumbent Labour Prime Minister has made the wrong call.
Firstly it was Jim Callaghan who delayed too long and let in Margaret Thatcher and more recently my old boss Gordon Brown dithered over the decision and eventually led to the coalition Government.
Prime Minister Brown’s decision or lack of it still haunts me today.
At the time I was finishing off a series of fishing programmes for the BBC and I must admit a few hours on the river with Robson Green was more fun than working as the political director of Unite the Union.
It was whilst doing this job that I was in regular contact with Gordon Brown and when it was first mooted that he might call an election following on fairly quickly from taking over from Tony Blair I was all for it.
Labour were ahead in the polls and Brown had quickly established himself as a decisive leader.
The problem is that once you allow speculation of an election to run you have to kill it quickly or go to the polls.
I will never forget meeting the PM and strongly advising him to go for it as did my old pal Ed Balls.
Weeks of dithering ensued but by the time he announced that there would be no early election the Tories were ahead in the polls and stayed there right up until the election that came some three years later.
Rishi Sunak has a very different problem because his party is regularly 20 per cent behind Labour in the opinion polls and calling an election any time soon would result in a landslide victory for Keir Starmer.
The Tory PM has at least killed speculation of a May election but that leaves him very little room to manoeuvre with most political pundits now suggesting an autumn election. I’m not so sure.
One of those badly advising Gordon Brown was from the USA and he convinced him to delay with the argument that if he waited until the last possible moment he would have been British Prime minister longer than JF Kennedy had been US President!
My guess is that Sunak will want to be Prime Minister as long as possible before he goes back to his hedge funds in California.
The last possible date for an election actually isn’t this year but next on the 25th January so who knows we could all be out campaigning with Father Christmas next year hoping for the best present ever – a thumping Tory defeat.
• Bad news this Christmas was the SNP government’s decision to slash funding for social homes by £188.8 million.
The SNP Finance Secretary Shona Robinson published the eye-watering cuts to the affordable housing programme in her budget. This is particularly bad news for the Highlands where there is a housing crisis.
Not only can young people not get on the housing ladder local workers can’t find anywhere to live as is so evident in Aviemore where pubs and restaurants regularly have to close for days because of staff shortages.
It’s not only the Tories that have failed the nation, the Scottish Nationalist Party has too.
• Charlie Whelan is former spokesman for Gordon Brown.
