With MPs arguing and agonising about when the general election should be, we may have hit peak parliamentary insanity.
The PM wants a general election on 15 October.
Tory rebels, led by Sir Oliver Letwin, and many Labour MPs, including frontbenchers, want polling day to be any time after 31 October.
What is this dispute all about? It is not about whether an election is coming. After yesterday’s Tory defection and mass expulsions – what one of those exiled, Sir Alistair Burt, calls a purge – Boris Johnson no longer has the numbers to govern in any meaningful sense. Paying the wages of Johnson and his team in these circumstances would be the very height of fiscal waste.
Also, all MPs accept – the Tory rebels and opposition parties with glee, Boris Johnson and most Tories with dismay – that the backbenchers’ bill being debated now, which would force the PM to ask for a Brexit delay, will become enacted at the end of this week.
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