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"If Mr Brown names the day, do not be surprised if the decision comes back to haunt him" - John Curtice 

By the time you read this, Gordon Brown may have called a general election. For the record, at the time of writing, I reckon the odds on him doing so are about 50:50. Yes, I am just as much in the dark as you about the Prime Minister’s electoral intentions!

But there is a much more important question to consider than whether Gordon Brown will call an election. It is whether he should do so. And what I have in mind here is not what would be in the best interests of the Labour Party. Rather it is whether any decision to do so can be regarded as consistent with the proper operation of a democracy. 

One of the distinctive, albeit not unique, features of the British constitution is that a Prime Minister can more or less call an election at will. A Prime Minister can be forced to the polls (or else has to resign from office) if he (and hitherto it has usually been ‘he’) loses a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. But otherwise so long as an election is held within five years, a Prime Minister is free to decide when and whether to call an election.

For the most part, Prime Ministers have exercised this power with discretion. Only twice since 1945 has a Prime Minister with a secure parliamentary majority called an election before at least four of his five years were up. The first occasion was in 1955 when Sir Anthony Eden succeeded Sir Winston Churchill as Prime Minister and opted to go to the polls. The second was in February 1974 when Sir Edward Heath tried to use an election to face down striking coal miners who were putting the nation’s lights out. But even on those two occasions, it was at least three and a half years since the last election. The other early postwar elections, called in 1951, 1966 and October 1974, all only happened after the outcome of the previous election had been indecisive.

So if Gordon Brown does decide to hold an election in November, his decision to call one, less than half way through a parliamentary term while in possession of a secure overall parliamentary majority, will be unprecedented in the postwar era. In fact there is only one precedent at all. This was in 1923 when Stanley Baldwin called an election just twelve months after the last election, even though his Conservative Government enjoyed a majority of 73.

Baldwin, like Gordon Brown, had succeeded an incumbent Prime Minister since the last election (in his case, Arthur Bonar Law who had been diagnosed with cancer). But in calling an election, he was not simply seeking a ‘personal mandate’, while there certainly were not any opinion polls to tell him whether he might win an early election. Rather, he had decided he wanted to introduce import tariffs, even though just a few months earlier, the Conservatives had campaigned against them. He felt honour bound to put his government’s new policy to the electoral test – and lost.

So if Gordon Brown does call an election this autumn, he will be the first Prime Minister who will appear to be doing so for no better reason than he thinks he can win. Inevitably such apparently naked partisan use of his power raises questions about whether a Prime Minister should indeed have the unfettered right to call an election whenever he pleases.

It is not clear why a Prime Minister should have this power. The most common argument deployed in its favour is that it helps ensure that in the event of a national crisis, such as the miners’ strike in 1974, or in the event that the incumbent government is finding it difficult to get its legislation through parliament, as was the case after the 1950, 1964 and February 1974 elections, an election can easily be called to secure a clear, popular verdict.

Yet the First Minister in Scotland does not have this power. An early election to the Holyrood chamber can only be called if two-thirds of MSPs vote in favour – or if the Parliament has failed to elect a First Minister within 28 days of an election or a vacancy. Equally, the Welsh Assembly operates on a ‘fixed-term’ basis too. This is despite the fact that no party has as yet come even close to securing a parliamentary majority in either body. Instead of asking the public to give a more decisive result, politicians in Edinburgh and Cardiff have to make the best of whatever and they are dealt.

The Prime Minister only has the power to call an election because dissolving parliament is one of the prerogative powers of the Crown – and like declaring war, these powers are nowadays only usually exercised by the monarch on the advice of her ministers. Yet intriguingly in the government’s recent White Paper on constitutional reform, Gordon Brown himself raised questions about whether the government should retain the largely unaccountable use of such powers – including the Prime Minister’s right to recommend dissolution.

Strangely, all this has been forgotten as Labour has salivated at the prospect of dealing the Conservatives a hammer blow by calling an early election. But if Mr Brown names the day, do not be surprised if the decision comes back to haunt him. For when unaccountable power is used for partisan ends, calls to curb that power are rarely far behind.

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