Here are the reasons why there must be and cannot be a general election. First, the drivers of a general election:
1) Tomorrow, MPs will start the process of identifying, via so-called indicative votes, a route through the Brexit mess that a majority of them can back.
2) This process is likely to continue next Monday, when a range of Brexit or no-Brexit options should be whittled down to one.
3) There will then be a vote, maybe the following day, compelling the prime minister to negotiate with Brussels whatever MPs have decided.
It is too early to say what option MPs will coalesce around. And maybe they are too fractious and divided to coalesce around any practical solution. But my hunch is that they will go for either a referendum, or a softer version of Brexit than Theresa May’s that would breach one or more of her red lines – for example, many MPs want the UK to be in the customs union, which would prohibit trade deals with countries outside the EU, and they favour the kind of costless access to the single market, which would make it impossible to take back control of immigration.
Here is the nightmare for Theresa May. If, as seems highly likely, MPs instruct the Prime Minister to negotiate a Brexit or no-Brexit outcome that conflicts with government policy, she and her ministers would be degraded into ciphers and puppets of MPs. They would have no discretion any longer over the most important decision facing this country for generations, how and whether to leave the EU. That would feel to her like a constitutional abomination. And she might well be right.
At that juncture, surely, the Prime Minister would have to call a general election. Because absent a general election, she could never re-establish her authority.
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