Could 2015 be a year of two elections - and three PMs?

My preview of the political year 2015, first published in yesterday's Journal.
 

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It is Thursday, December 31, 2015. The newly-elected Prime Minister sinks contentedly into an armchair at 10 Downing Street, pours himself a drink, and reflects on a tumultuous year in British politics.

Not since 1974 had there been two general elections in a single year. Not since 1852 had there been three Prime Ministers in one year.

Suddenly there is a knock on the door. “The Deputy Prime Minister is here to see you, Mr Johnson,” says the PM’s chief of staff.

“Ask her to wait in the drawing room,” the Prime Minister replies. “I’ll be along in just a moment.”

The Prime Minister had not, of course, expected to end the year in this exalted position. David Cameron and Ed Miliband had led their respective parties into the May general election and he himself had not even been on his own party’s front bench.

But the public had demonstrated its distinct lack of enthusiasm for both Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband by delivering a second successive hung Parliament. The Conservatives were, once again, the biggest single party.

But the parliamentary arithmetic was far more complex than the 2010 contest which had resulted in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition.

While the Lib Dems’ representation dropped from 57 to 29, with Nick Clegg’s Sheffield Hallam seat among the casualties, the Scottish Nationalists had won 22 MPs and Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party ten.

The result was stalemate. The SNP’s new leader at Westminster, Alex Salmond, was as good as his word and refused to make any accommodation with the Conservatives.

Meanwhile the Tory and Lib Dem parliamentary parties refused to make any accommodation with each other, such was their mutual loathing by this stage after five tense years of coalition.

Mr Farage’s ten seats, together with those of the Ulster Unionist parties, were enough to cobble together a bare parliamentary majority – but there were two conditions on which the Ukip leader absolutely refused to budge.

The first was that the referendum on British membership of the EU was to be brought forward to 2016. The second was the immediate resignation of David Cameron as Tory leader.

So it was that, after several days of high politics and low skulduggery, Theresa May was installed as Britain’s second female Prime Minister, in what was in part an attempt to forestall the inevitable leadership challenge by Boris Johnson, newly returned to the Commons.

But the government’s position was so precarious that everyone knew there would soon have to be a second election – with Labour also set to go into the contest under a new leader after Mr Miliband fell on his sword.

A summer of political turbulence followed, with Mrs May disappointing those admirers who had once seen her as Britain’s answer to Angela Merkel by appearing to be at the mercy of both Mr Farage and Mr Johnson.

The Tories seemed bent on self-destruction as party activists, angered at the apparent “coronation” of the new premier, demanded she submit to a leadership contest with the London Mayor.

By the time the election came, in the first week of November, it was clear that the public was fed up with multi-party government.

Mr Farage’s machinations over the summer months had brought accusations that the Ukip tail was well and truly wagging the Tory dog and the public mood appeared to have turned somewhat against the Ukip leader.

His cause was not helped by warnings from several major employers, including Nissan, that they would quit the UK if the 2016 referendum on EU membership resulted in a no-vote.

The election duly delivered the clear verdict which the previous two had failed to do, giving the new government a slim but comfortable working majority of 23.

All of which brings us back to 10 Downing Street and the arrival of the new Prime Minister’s deputy for a New Year’s Eve pow-wow with her boss.

“So, any regrets?” said Stella Creasy, herself newly-elected to the role occupied for the previous eight years by Harriet Harman, and now seen very much as Labour’s rising star.

“Well,” replied Alan Johnson, “I never wanted the job, of course, but when 150 of your MPs simultaneously post messages on Twitter saying you’re the only person who can save the party from another election defeat, what on earth can you do?”

“The best man won in the end, Prime Minister,” said his deputy reassuringly, and wished him a very Happy New Year.

Taxi for Balls? My political predictions for 2013

Andy Murray will win Wimbledon, Roberto Mancini will be sacked as manager of Manchester City, David and Victoria Beckham will return to the UK, and the X-Factor will finally be canned after ten not always glorious years.

Those were just some of the predictions for 2013 made by members of the public in a recent poll on what we expect to see happening in the year ahead.

But so much for the sport and showbiz; what of the politics?  Well, in last week’s column looking back at 2012 I suggested that the next 12 months may well see the Con-Lib Coalition that has governed the country since May 2010 finally splitting asunder.

It seems I am not alone in this view:  the prospect of Messrs Cameron and Clegg going their separate ways was also mentioned in the aforesaid poll, along with a rise in interest rates, a strike by NHS workers and the prosecution of a major bank for fraud.

So what’s causing the present bout of Coalition-busting speculation?  Well, anyone who heard Nick Clegg’s speech at the Royal Commonwealth Society shortly before Christmas will not be surprised that talk of divorce is in the air.

The speech was less about Lib Dem achievements in government as about what Mr Clegg’s party had prevented the Tories from doing.

It was all a far cry from the government’s early days when the Lib Dem leader had been determined that his party should jointly ‘own’ all of the Coalition’s policies - not just those which it had specifically advocated.

But that strategy was only destined to work so long as the Coalition was popular.   Once it started to be unpopular – as has happened in 2012 – it was inevitable that Mr Clegg would begin to embark on a strategy of differentiation.

It has been my view from the outset that the Lib Dems would somehow have to find a way of getting out of the Coalition alive in order to stand any chance of maintaining a significant parliamentary presence at the next election, and I expect this process to be accelerated in the coming year.

The internal politics of the two parties will play a big part.   If Mr Clegg does not, by the time of his party’s annual conference, set out some kind of exit strategy, he will almost certainly face a leadership challenge before the election.

At the same time, those Tory backbench voices which loathe the Lib Dems and all their works will grow louder, as they seek to press David Cameron into the more orthodox Conservative position that they believe – mistakenly in my view – will secure them an outright majority next time round.

I would expect the upshot to be that the Lib Dems will leave the government within the next 12-15 months, with the Tories moving to a “confidence and supply” arrangement for the remainder of the five-year Parliament.

But while the Coalition may struggle to maintain the semblance of unity, Labour leader Ed Miliband will also struggle to present himself as the Prime Minister-in-waiting that Mr Cameron and Tony Blair so obviously were in their opposition days.

Mr Miliband has had his successes, but the full rashness of Labour’s decision to choose him over his brother David will become clear over the next 12 months.

Overtures will be made to the South Shields MP to return the frontline as Shadow Chancellor in place of Ed Balls, whose closeness to Gordon Brown and the errors of the New Labour years will ultimately prove a fatal barrier to the party’s attempts to regain economic credibility.

But a likelier outcome is a comeback for the respected former Chancellor, Alistair Darling, who has successfully managed to distance himself from Mr Brown’s mistakes.

Mr Balls may not be the only major economic player to be shown the door in 2013.  If the economy continues to stagnate, Mr Cameron may also be forced to find a new role for George Osborne as the election draws nearer.

And with Mr Osborne out of the Tory succession picture, attempts will be made to build up Education Secretary Michael Gove as the alternative contender from within the Cabinet to counter the continuing threat of Boris Johnson.

Unlike poor old Mr Mancini, I don’t expect we will see any of the three main party leaders actually losing their jobs in 2013.

What we will see, though, is each of them having to take fairly drastic action in order to save them.

If you want to see the future of politics, just listen to 'God'

Following on from last week's Review of 2011, here's my look ahead to the political year 2012.

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Predicting the future is always a risky business, but anyone looking for some pointers as to the direction which British politics might take over the next few years could do worse than listen to ‘God.’

Of course, by that I don’t mean him upstairs – though doubtless he might also have something to say about it - but the man who is universally known by that nickname in Westminster circles – the outgoing Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell.

Sir Gus officially retired yesterday as Britain’s most senior civil servant, but not before breaking the habit of a lifetime and firing off a few opinions of his own in a series of exit interviews with assorted media outlets.

In them he warned, among other things, that the greatest challenge facing Britain over the coming years would not be the state of the economy or even its future place in the European Union, but simply holding the United Kingdom together.

Sir Gus’s comments served as a necessary corrective to the fact that the implications of Scottish and Welsh devolution for the rest of the UK have sometimes been overlooked.

In last week’s column reviewing the political year 2011, I noted that the referendum on reform of the voting system held in May last year did not, in the end, prove to be the political game-changer that some of us thought it might be.

But there was something else that happened on the same day which may well prove to be of much greater significance in the longer-term – the outright victory of Alex Salmond’s Scottish Nationalists in the elections to the Scottish Parliament.

We have already seen how Mr Salmond is prepared to use such issues as the Eurozone crisis to press the case for Scottish independence, and we can expect much more of this in the coming year.

On the future of the Coalition, however, Sir Gus was less outspoken, saying that he expected it to run its course until a general election in 2015.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that he should take such a view, in that he played a pivotal role in bringing the Coalition together in the first place, and thus has an emotional stake in its long-term survival.

But ultimately, the Coalition will survive only as long as it is in the Conservatives’ interests for it to survive – and it is here that the underlying political dynamics may well be shifting.

With his party enjoying an unexpected mid-term lead in the opinion polls, might Prime Minister David Cameron be tempted over the next 12 months to try to convert that into the outright Commons majority that eluded him in May 2010?

We shall see. But Mr Cameron is perhaps fortunate in that the issue most likely to bring about a split between the Coalition partners is one on which his party enjoys far greater public support than the Liberal Democrats, namely Europe.

As John Redwood pointed out earlier this month, an election over the UK’s future relationship with the EU would be a very easy one for the Tories to win, and Mr Cameron would not be human if he did not at least toy with the idea of engineering one.

But if that Tory opinion poll lead is raising questions about the future of the Coalition, it is raising even more urgent ones about the future of Labour leader Ed Miliband.

His survival in the role must now be open to real doubt and is surely set to be one of the big running political stories of 2012.

History, at least, would suggest that Mr Miliband has little to worry about. The Labour Party does not do assassinations, and invariably allows its leaders the chance to fight at least one election even if they are patently not up to the task.

Against that, both Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot were at least able to demonstrate mid-term opinion poll leads over Margaret Thatcher, even if they went on to crushing defeats.

Mr Miliband has gained an unlikely ally in the Tory columnist Peter Oborne, who this week praised his attempts to move away from what he called the “manipulation and cynicism of the modernising era. “

But while 2012 may well see a growing appetite for a more value-based style of politics, it is far from clear that the public sees Mr Miliband as the man to deliver it.

A prophecy fulfilled

A month into the new year, the 2008 media narrative of the Second Brown Bounce now seems a very distant memory. Here's today's Journal column.

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Four weeks ago, in my annual preview of the political year ahead, I commented that the art of political forecasting was now becoming a good deal harder than predicting the outcomes of sporting contests.

My point was that the sheer unpredictability of the UK political scene during 2008 – the year of bank nationalisation and the Second Brown Bounce – made sports punditry a doddle by comparison.

But a month into the New Year, I seem to have proved myself wrong. The sporting prediction I made, that Chelsea would regain the premiership title, is already looking pretty threadbare.

By contrast, it seems I was spot on with my political forecasting – that the recession would get much, much worse – and that the political standing of Gordon Brown and Labour would again start to deteriorate.

It didn’t take long, did it? Once again, the Tories are now enjoying the kind of double-digit lead in the opinion polls that would see David Cameron on course for a sizeable Commons majority.

The mood in the country appears to have turned, perhaps decisively. An electorate which a few months back appeared to be impressed with Gordon Brown’s handling of the economic crisis now seems angry and looking around for someone to blame.

I myself noticed the atmosphere change around the back end of November, perhaps at the point at which Woolworths went into administration, to be followed by a series of other High Street names.

Up until then, it had been possible to believe that the crisis really was just about banks refusing to lend to eachother. Over the past two months, though, the impact in the “real economy” has finally been felt – with a vengeance.

Two weeks ago, it was 1,200 jobs lost at Nissan in Sunderland. This week it was 2,500 at steelmaker Corus. Once again the very survival of the UK’s manufacturing base is under threat.

And it’s not just manufacturing of course. It is very obvious to anyone working in a commercial environment that we are facing unprecedentedly difficult times - not least in the newspaper industry.

So the Prime Minister is once again back in a very bad place, and for the Cabinet, as well as for the rest of us, these are anxious days indeed.

As one of the more perceptive Westminster observers wrote this week: “Nerves are beginning to fray. Ministers watch the polls and the economy with equal fascination. The debate about the future of the party and its leadership is under way.”

And if the mood in the country has changed, so has the Prime Minister’s. Once again, the pressure seems to be starting to get to him.

The self-confident, swaggering Gordon of last autumn, when he was busy saving the world from economic catastrophe, has gone, and the old, anxious, workaholic Gordon has returned.

Some say that the possibility of a parliamentary defeat in the vote over the Heathrow third runway this week - a potentially serious blow but hardly terminal, if you’ll excuse the pun - had Mr Brown close to tears.

It seems it was less the issue itself, more the prospect of being seen to be losing his grip that was exercising the Prime Minister.

What has been particularly damaging for Mr Brown over the past month is that, increasingly, independent economic assessments of the UK’s position seem at odds with his own.

Since the start of the crisis, the Prime Minister’s defence has been twofold. Firstly, that it wasn’t my fault, guv. Secondly, that Britain was better placed to weather the coming storm than any other major economy.

The International Monetary Fund begs to differ, however, arguing this week that the slump’s impact will be worse in the coming year in Britain than in the US, Japan, Spain, Italy, France, Canada and Germany.

Even if they turn about to be wrong, it’s a gift to the opposition parties who will no doubt use it repeatedly to undermine the Prime Minister’s boasts about his management of the economy over the past 12 years.

And there is of course one boast in particular will haunt Mr Brown to the end of his days – the claim, repeated as recently as his 2007 Budget Speech, to have abolished “boom and bust.”

The Radio Four presenter Evan Davis gave a fairly good impersonation of his BBC colleague Jeremy Paxman when asking him about it on the Today Programme this week.

Whereas Paxman famously asked Michael Howard 14 times whether he had threatened to overrule the director of the prison service, Davis only managed to ask Brown seven times whether he now accepted that boom had indeed followed bust.

But the effect was the same – a politician pointlessly trying to dodge a journalist’s question when he has already damned himself out of his own, hubristic mouth.

In that New Year column, I made reference to the possibility that Mr Brown may not, in the end, lead his party into the next general election.

This might have seemed like a foolhardy thing to say at the time, given that the dominant 2008 media narrative had been of Mr Brown’s amazing comeback from the ranks of the political walking dead following the election-that-never-was debacle of autumn 2007.

But just as he never succeeded in abolishing boom and bust, I never seriously believed he had succeeded in abolishing the most fundamental law of politics – that governments who preside over economic catastrophe invariably end up facing electoral oblivion.

Now that this fundamental law is starting to reassert itself, it is only a matter of time before the plotting begins again.

Will Gordon survive 2009?

Could Gordon Brown yet stand down before the next election? It's possible. Here's my "Preview of the Year" column from today's Journal.

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Chelsea will regain the Premiership title, the Man Booker Prize will be won by a book about India, Kate Winslet will win an Oscar, King Kev will not return to St James’ Park, and it will snow in April.

Next to UK politics, sport, award ceremonies and the British weather are relatively easy things to predict these days.

But what will the next 12 months hold for Messrs Brown, Cameron, Clegg and Co after a year in which expecting the unexpected became the only real political certainty?

Will 2009 be equally unpredictable – or will we see politics start to return to something approaching “normality?” Well, here are four consequential predictions for how I think the political year could pan out.

Firstly, the recession will deepen in the first half of the year, with soaring levels of unemployment, house repossessions and the number of firms going bust.

Secondly, the political standing of Gordon Brown and Labour, having recovered over the course of 2008, will again start to deteriorate.

Thirdly, the soul-searching will begin again as to whether Mr Brown should lead Labour into the next General Election and whether it would not be better if he stood down with dignity before then.

Fourthly, the outcome of this renewed bout of internal Labour navel-gazing will depend utterly on whether there is any evidence of recovery by the end of the year which could give the party a fighting chance in a 2010 election.

Of these four assertions, the most contentious is probably the second one.

That the recession is going to get worse is something which almost all economists agree upon. However not all political commentators agree that this will necessarily lead to a deterioration in the government’s political position

To suggest that it will do represents a departure from the 2008 “media narrative” of Gordon Brown as the “comeback kid,” defying the normal laws of political gravity by appearing to thrive on economic bad news.

But a new year often heralds a reappraisal, and to my mind, the sheer glut of economic bad news on the way suggests it will be hard for Labour’s recovery to be maintained.

No doubt some readers will already be wondering why I think the economy will cause the political tide to turn against Mr Brown in 2009 when it manifestly failed to do so in 2008.

Well, I think what it boils down to is the impact of what some have termed “the real economy” on voting intentions.

The 2008 crisis was effectively about banks refusing to lend to eachother and credit drying up, and Mr Brown was generally applauded for the way in which he tried to tackle this.

This year, though, the outworkings of the downturn will be much more immediately and keenly felt in peoples’ lives, and the level of anger directed at the government will increase as a result.

There is also the point that support for Mr Brown to tackle the economic crisis may still not translate into real votes for Labour when it comes to placing crosses on ballot papers.

As I wrote last year, the prevailing public mood towards him may very well be a case of: “We want you to stay to sort out this mess – and then we want you to go.”

It follows from my predictions that I don’t think Mr Brown is going to give the voters the chance to kick him out any time in 2009.

Indeed, if Mr Brown had been considering a 2009 election as an option, I think the decision will be very soon taken out of his hands by the wave of redundancies and bankruptcies in the offing.

There are, at least, some European elections coming up in June, and these are likely to be dire for the Prime Minister.

A combination of protest voting over the economy coupled with residual anger among some voters over the refusal to allow a referendum on the European constitution could prove a lethal cocktail for Labour.

It will add fuel to the new media narrative that Mr Brown and Labour are on the way down again and that the “Second Brown Bounce” has finally come to an end.

It is likely to herald a second successive summer of Labour leadership plotting, although whether South Shields MP David Miliband will dip his toes into the water again after last year’s abortive coup remains to be seen.

To retain the confidence of his party Mr Brown will need some economic good news as he goes into the autumn conference season – some demonstrable sign that he has started to turn things around again.

But what if the light at the end of the tunnel fails to appear? What if by that stage it has become clear that Labour is heading for a defeat as cataclysmic as 1997 was for the Tories?

Well, I have felt in my bones for some time that if Mr Brown reaches the point where he concludes Labour cannot win with him as leader, he will stand aside.

Everything in his character points to it – most notably his intense risk-aversion in relation to his own career coupled with his intense loyalty to the party.

The other two main party leaders seem safe for the time being. David Cameron may have failed to establish himself as a Prime Minister in waiting, but the polls are still running in his favour and his party will give him at least one shot at glory.

And Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will become an increasingly significant figure as the two big parties court his support in the event of a hung Parliament.

But as for Mr Brown….I think it is at least possible that by this time next year he will have announced he is not contesting the election, and that Labour will fight under a new leader to be elected early in 2010.

As ever, it will all come down to “the economy, stupid.”

The great game of political forecasting

Mike Smithson is currently inviting entries to his annual Political Forecaster of the Year contest over on PoliticalBetting.com. There are 27 questions in all, ranging from the holders of the major offices, to the extent of the post-Blair bounce, to the likely net gains and losses in the May elections.

My entry is already in, but for the benefit of my own readers, here are my answers to the first five questions together with a short explanation of my choice.

On Christmas Day 2007 who will be…? (50 points for each correct answer except where stated)

1. Prime Minister (bonus of 150 points for correct answers that are not Gordon Brown.) As it's a game, that 150 point bonus looked very tempting. But I genuinely do believe it will be Gordon, and I'm not about to switch horses now.

2. Leader of the Opposition. It will be David Cameron. The Tory right may not like what he is doing, but they won't move against him. Until he loses an election, that is.

3. Leader of the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg, after a narrow victory over Chris Huhne. Expect Sir Ming to bow out during the summer "on health grounds" after continuing to fail to make an impact.

4. Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. This one is the closest to call but I am plumping for Jon Cruddas over Hilary Benn, just because I think Labour members will see it as their chance to have a "say."

5. Chancellor of the Exchequer. Will be David Miliband, in return for not standing for leader. The Miliblogger is the only man who can beat Gordy, and he will have extracted the Treasury job as the price of the deal.

Update: Mike is also inviting contributions on who will be the first minister to resign or be sacked this year. Patricia Hewitt looks quite good value to me at 18-1.