Labour’s cynical election date posturing is fooling no one

Regardless of what Starmer thinks, Sunak is still Prime Minister. Only he can decide when we head to the polls

And so it came to pass that months of careful strategic planning culminated in a Photoshopped picture of the prime minister wearing a chicken suit. 
Well, of course it did. And we may assume that political discourse in the next few, long months can only degenerate from this intellectual apotheosis.
Labour’s intentions in talking up the prospect of a May 2 general election were so obvious and unsubtle that it hardly bears mentioning. Not that there was anything unusual or particularly unethical in their cynicism – most opposition parties perform the same trick at some point. But did they really expect us to fall for it?
For weeks shadow cabinet members have been briefing furiously that the election would, after all, be called for May 2. Sunak is hoping to wrong-foot us, they would whisper in lobby journalists’ ears. “Things can only get worse for him over the summer, so he’ll cut and run on the same day as the local elections, take it from me, mate. Another beer?”
All of this was despite an earlier commitment from the prime minister that the general election wouldn’t take place until the second half of the year, explicitly ruling out May 2. But that mattered not, for who would recall such a comment? Better to brief that May 2 is the likeliest date and then, after the inevitable denial (which came last evening in an interview Sunak gave to a regional TV station) publish that photo of him in the chicken suit, you know, the one that was prepared just before the Christmas party.
It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, just part of the peculiarly British tradition of Guess The Polling Day. It strikes me as odd that speculation has continued to focus on either the local elections date in May or some time in the autumn, usually cited as late October. Setting aside Sunak’s earlier remarks about holding the election later in the year, why has June been so quickly ruled out?This is the Thatcher gambit. On two occasions – in 1983 and again in 1987 – the former prime minister waited to see the results of the local elections in May before finally deciding that the general election would occur a month later. Sunak might conceivably pull the same trick this year; better-than-expected results in the shires and the various mayoral elections might persuade him to take his chances on June 6 if he calculates that he can minimise losses that way. 
What is even odder is that all this speculation and the acknowledgement that the prime minister has the freedom to call an election at a time best suited to his own party’s prospects is doing the rounds without any complaint about the principle of the thing. 
It was barely a decade ago that the Conservatives, Labour and the Tories’ then sidekicks, the Liberal Democrats, all agreed that they would support the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill that the LibDems had negotiated with their bigger partner. The principle that no prime minister should be able to set the date of an election was solemnly repeated and endorsed by all sides and the Bill duly became an Act. 
And then Theresa May happened, followed by Boris Johnson and the embarrassing spectacle of the Tantrum Parliament during which many of our elected tribunes seemed to lose their marbles and the only way to bring them to their senses was to hold another election. 
Thus the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which turned out to be not remotely effective at guaranteeing five-year terms (and why was it five years rather than four years anyway?) was consigned to the dustbin of history. And nobody, even those valiant constitutional reformers who believe as a point of principle that if a convention has existed for a long time, it must be abolished and “reformed”, mourned its passing.
The status quo ante now prevails and parliament is the better for it. It turns out that even without an unnecessary and clumsy piece of legislation, the longer a prime minister holds on to office and the closer we come to a parliament’s statutory end, the less room for manoeuvre he has and the more entertaining it is for those of us with no dog in the fight. 
Sunak has very little wriggle room, but he still has some. That strikes some as unfair: why should he rather than, say, the leader of the opposition, have the sole authority to seek the monarch’s permission to dissolve parliament at a time of his choosing? 
The answer is a simple one: because his party won the last election and Rishi Sunak, not Keir Starmer, is the prime minister. You want the leader of the opposition to have more say in when an election is called? Then try harder to win an election. Then let’s see how eager the new incumbent is to throw away this very British political and constitutional advantage.