The rear-view mirror ought to warn us against making 2024 election predictions

It’s amazing how much can happen in a year. I thought it was quite possible that the UK would never leave the EU and Johnson wouldn’t last long, yet here we are, writes John Rentoul

Many thought Boris Johnson wouldn’t last long, because they believed he would fail to deliver Brexit (Getty)

A year ago Conservative MPs held the first of five ballots in their leadership election. Boris Johnson came top, with 114 votes out of 313. Esther McVey, Mark Harper and Andrea Leadsom failed to win the 17 votes needed to stay in the race and by the evening Matt Hancock, who won 20 votes, had also withdrawn.

It was not certain that Johnson, with about one third of the votes, was going to win, but there was already speculation about how he would deal with a “Remainer” parliament if he did.

Rory Stewart, who would eventually come fifth, appeared in front of the TV cameras that were then stationed permanently in the Central Lobby of parliament, to warn him against suspending democracy: “If Boris Johnson dared to lock the doors of parliament, we would bring him down.”

In the end, Johnson did try to prorogue parliament, although not in such a way that would have forced the UK to leave the EU without a deal on 31 October, which was what his opponents feared. And his attempt was struck down by the Supreme Court in any case – I can still hear the gasp in the makeshift press room at the Labour Party conference in Brighton when Lady Hale announced the decision.

The point of this excursion into recent history is to observe how much can happen in a year. A year ago, Theresa May was still prime minister. Many thought Johnson wouldn’t last long, because they could see that he would fail to do the one thing he promised he would, “come what may”. I thought it was quite possible that the UK would never leave the EU, because I did not see how the parliamentary deadlock could be broken.

I do not believe that Johnson and his advisers could see it either. They made mistake after mistake. They gave up the attempt to block Hilary Benn’s backbench bill in the Lords, which required the prime minister to postpone Brexit rather than to leave without a deal. They tried to prorogue parliament and failed. In the end, they tried to call an election and failed in that too. But then Labour MPs started to waver, and voted for the first stage of the new withdrawal agreement that Johnson negotiated with Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister. Suddenly, Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat leader, said she would support an early election, and with one bound the prime minister was free.

Since then we have left the EU – and suffered a pandemic at a cost of 64,000 excess deaths and a quarter of the economy. Not that any of this has deterred people from trying to predict the future, from the likelihood of a second wave to the implications for politics. But it is notable how cautious pundits are about, for example, the US presidential election, now just five months away. The country is still in the middle of a health and economic crisis, and no one knows if voting in person will even be possible.

Predicting a British election that is probably four years away is even harder. But that is not going to stop us trying.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator