If it had not been for Nick Clegg, it would be all over for Rishi Sunak by now

An unexpected and unintended legacy of the coalition years has given the Conservatives hope, writes John Rentoul

Thanks to Clegg, the three by-elections were a three-way tie and the media consensus is that the general election could still be competitive (PA Archive)

If it had not been for Nick Clegg, it would be all over for Rishi Sunak by now. The former deputy prime minister, having roared mightily about constitutional reform, brought forth a mouse: the Recall of MPs Act 2015.

It was this act that prompted Boris Johnson to resign as an MP, triggering a by-election in Uxbridge. Johnson jumped before he was pushed, because the Committee of Privileges was going to open the way to a recall petition in his constituency. That petition would have required the signatures of 10 per cent of voters in the constituency to force a by-election.

So there would have been a by-election if Johnson hadn’t resigned, and if he had stood his ground and fought it, he would almost certainly have won – by campaigning against the extension of the ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) which he had created as mayor. As it was, Steve Tuckwell, the new Conservative candidate, won; a victory that has changed the prism through which politics has been reported since.

If there had been no Recall of MPs Act, Johnson would have been suspended from the House of Commons for something like 90 days, but he would not have faced a by-election. He might have flounced out and caused one anyway, so furious was he at what he thought was a witch-hunt against him, but his ill-founded belief that he would return soon enough to the premiership was also strong, and would probably have been enough to keep him in parliament.

In which case there would have been by-elections on 20 July only in Selby and in Somerton. Sunak’s government would have lost two seats on huge swings – one to Labour, and one to the Liberal Democrats. As James O’Malley, the former editor of the tech site Gizmodo, put it: instead of green policies, we would be talking about “how the Tories are heading for a historic wipeout of Canada 1993 proportions”. That was when Kim Campbell’s governing Progressive Conservative Party was reduced from 156 seats to two.

No one outside London would have noticed that the Ulez was being expanded at the end of this month. The prime minister might not have spotted the political opportunity afforded by Labour’s policy of ending North Sea drilling, and Greenpeace might have left his constituency home alone. Instead, we would be reading articles headed, “How ready is Labour for government?” “How to avoid a wealth tax” and “Shouldn’t Keir Starmer just take over now?”

Instead, Nick Clegg’s legacy has been to convince some optimistic Conservatives and pessimistic Labourites that Sunak can claw back some of the gap between him and Starmer over the next year, by pitching his cost-conscious “proportionate and pragmatic” approach to net zero against Labour’s expensive “eco-zealotry”.

Which only goes to show how arbitrary politics can be, and how what Alastair Campbell calls the media prism can shift dramatically in response to random events. Indeed, imagine a third scenario, sketched by Professor Robert Ford of Manchester University. If Nigel Adams hadn’t quit his Selby seat in a fit of pique over his omission from his friend Johnson’s resignation honours list, the only by-elections last month would have been a Lib Dem gain in Somerton and a Tory hold in Uxbridge. Labour would be in “absolute meltdown”, Prof Ford wrote, “with a torrent of hot takes about how Starmer’s poll lead is a mirage”.

Instead, thanks to Clegg, the three by-elections were a three-way tie and the media consensus is that the general election could still be competitive. The passing of the Recall of MPs Act was not quite the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in the Amazon rainforest of classic chaos theory, but its effects have not been what its drafters expected.

It was a bad and unnecessary law, like the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, now repealed, but not as serious. It was passed only to give the Lib Dem grassroots a consolation prize for their failure to win the 2011 referendum on changing the voting system and for the Tories blocking their plan to reform the House of Lords. David Cameron didn’t mind it, in the watered-down form that Clegg produced, because it bought off some of the pressure from Tory radicals such as Douglas Carswell and Zac Goldsmith.

The original idea was to give any group of constituents the power to start a petition to have their MP removed and forced to contest a by-election. That was too foolish and too undemocratic even for Clegg, as it would mean, depending on the thresholds required, continuous by-elections in marginal seats as defeated candidates sought excuses to refight their battles at times when the incumbent party was unpopular nationally.

Clegg wrote into the act a gatekeeper role for parliament, in that by-election would be triggered only if an MP were suspended by the House of Commons for 10 days or longer. I still didn’t agree with it. In my view, there are already two recall powers for MPs and we do not need a third. The first is in the hands of the courts, in that any MP who is sentenced to jail for more than a year is automatically removed. The second is in the hands of the voters, in that they can get rid of any MP of whom they disapprove at a general election. If people say that five years is too long to wait to get rid of a malign or useless MP, I am inclined to agree, in which case the solution is to reduce the maximum length of parliaments to four years.

Instead, Clegg invented a whole new third track, which gives quasi-judicial powers to committees of MPs to rule on alleged misdemeanours that fail to attract a jail sentence in the courts.

Also, I don’t like the petition system, which means that voters who go to the equivalent of polling stations to sign can be identified as opposing their MP – only those who sign by post or by proxy can keep their “vote” confidential.

The system has been used only four times: against Ian Paisley Jr (it failed to reach the 10 per cent threshold); Fiona Onasanya (driving offence; seat retained by Labour); Christopher Davies (expenses; seat won by Lib Dems, regained by Tories at general election four months later); and Margaret Ferrier (breach of coronavirus rules; by-election pending).

This last may be the most consequential case yet, as it gives Starmer the chance to show that Labour can gain seats from the Scottish National Party, which could make a big difference to the outcome of the general election. The collapse of the SNP has reduced the mountain that Labour has to climb in England and Wales by 20-30 seats.

Yet it was in Uxbridge, where the Recall of MPs Act was never actually used, that the law had its most dramatic effect. Eight years after he left office, Clegg is still propping up the Tory party, keeping its hopes alive for the next general election.