The abolition of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act has unexpectedly strengthened Boris Johnson

The ability to call an election at the time of his choosing has been restored to the prime minister, writes John Rentoul

‘The act certainly gives the prime minister an illusion of power’ (EPA)

It was a historic moment, when Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, announced to the House of Commons that the Dissolution and Calling of Parliaments Act had received the royal assent.

The new act repealed the much unloved Fixed-term Parliaments Act, bringing an 11-year constitutional experiment to an end, with the very conservative conclusion that the way we did it before was better.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act met the needs of the moment, when the coalition government was formed in 2010. The Liberal Democrats needed an assurance that David Cameron wouldn’t break up the coalition when it suited him, by calling a snap election if the Conservatives were ahead in the opinion polls.

So the act set the date of the next election, five years after the last one (a last-moment change suggested by George Osborne: the original plan had been a four-year term), with complicated rules allowing earlier elections in emergencies.

The act was never needed. The Tories never came close to wanting an early election between 2010 and 2015, but smashed the Lib Dems anyway when the time came. Thereafter, its unintended consequences helped shape the Brexit crisis.

Theresa May could have won the 2017 election if she had gone for a shorter campaign, but she added an extra two weeks to give her time to pass a law to override the Fixed-term Parliaments Act if she couldn’t secure the two-thirds Commons majority that she needed under its terms. As it was, Jeremy Corbyn gave her the two-thirds majority and then surprised most people, including himself, by closing the Tories’ 20-point lead during the election campaign.

Thereafter, the act helped gum up the constitutional works by ensuring that parliament was deadlocked when it failed to approve May’s Brexit deal. Neither May nor Boris Johnson was able to call an election to try to resolve the issue – until Johnson finally tempted Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem leader, to give him the votes to pass a law by a simple majority to override the act.

By then the flaws in the act were glaring, and the Tories and Labour both promised in their manifestos for the 2019 election to abolish it. Now it has finally gone. The power to decide the date of an election has been restored to the prime minister. What difference will it make?

If Britain ever voted to leave the European Union again in another referendum, and parliament couldn’t agree on how or even whether to do it, the prime minister would be able to call an election straight away instead of having to resort to some of the extreme tactics Boris Johnson used in 2019.

So there is that. And the paradox is that now that Johnson has the power to decide the election date, it is most likely that he (or his successor) will choose the date that had been stipulated in the defunct act: 2 May 2024.

Even so, the flexibility – to go early or to wait until the last date specified by the new act, 28 January 2025 – certainly gives the prime minister an illusion of power and an ability to destabilise the opposition by keeping them guessing. I say the illusion of power, because prime ministers have not always judged election timings to their best advantage: Callaghan should have gone in 1978; and Brown in 2007; while May shouldn’t have gone in 2017.

There may be more important consequences. One feature of the pre-2010 arrangement was that, although the maximum length of a parliament was five years, the assumption was that, if things were going reasonably well for a government, elections would be every four years. Thus the elections of 1955, 1959, 1970, 1983, 1987, 2001 and 2005 were held after four years. Prime ministers only ran out the clock in 1964, 1979, 1997 and 2010 because they feared they would lose if they went earlier.

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This time, the next election is likely to split the difference, and to be four-and-a-half years after the last, because the 2019 election was held in unusual circumstances in the darkest days of winter. But the election after next is more likely to be in 2028 than in 2029.

The other effect may be on the leadership crisis in the Conservative Party. If Johnson thinks that Tory MPs are about to depose him as party leader, he could try to use his power under the new act to call a general election. It is not clear what might happen then, but the threat could be enough to keep him in post.

The repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act may not have changed the date of the next election, but it may have decided who will lead the Conservatives into it.