Snap general election is about buying time for Brexit
The snap election is about consolidating control and buying time to negotiate a final Brexit deal with the EU, says Faisal Islam.
Wednesday 19 April 2017 07:44, UK
Underlying the Prime Minister's General election gambit are two things. This is about control. It is the opposite of a gamble.
The risk here would have been not to act.
The economy is unlikely to get better in the next three years, and having triggered Article 50, there are now many things well out of her control in terms of the deal.
Writing the Article 50 letter was a high watermark of control in the Brexit process.
But the actual process was designed to take negotiating power away from the departing country.
Jeremy Corbyn is a known quantity to her party and to the electorate.
Labour might well have replaced him with someone more popular.
A snap election leaves Theresa May against an opponent she is sure she will beat.
It explains her desire not just to be elected, but to be elected with a large majority.
It is also worth noting that the initial Commons frenzy anticipating a snap election in mid-March came as a result of the police investigations into Conservative expenses.
Opposition MPs claimed they could see a path to "many by-elections", enough to have cost the PM her slim majority.
Even the tiniest possibility that this might be true would have made anyone think long and hard about an option which removes this risk.
That yesterday came as a surprise was only the result of Number 10 denying it in the strongest possible terms in the past month.
The PM may well only have decided in the past week while walking in Snowdonia, but the path of her amble in Wales marked out a rather large U-turn.
On top of that it was obvious she could not pass many of her own personal signature policies.
Grammar schools would have been squashed in the House of Lords as it was not a manifesto commitment.
In this Parliament the Conservative Government has not been able to pass one of its biggest fiscal measures in all of its three Budgets.
The Budget document was starting to resemble a consultation paper, ready to be unpicked by the likes of Treasury-slaying Tory backbencher Stephen McPartland.
Calling for a General Election makes the PM look in control - and helps her win more control.
The irony of course being she is not in control because of the Fixed Term Parliament Act.
Mr Corbyn eschewed the opportunity to win any political points by, for example, obliging her to table a motion of no confidence in herself.
As ever though, Brexit looms large.
The admission in an interview with me this month that as a "third country" the UK could not get a signed EU trade deal within two years, was also highly significant.
It raised the possibility that a deal securing the UK-EU trade relationship would not be signed by the next scheduled General Election.
That in turn made a transition deal or "implementation phase" involving some European Court of Justice oversight and perhaps even some freedom of movement a racing certainty.
If she wins this election with a bigger majority, she has bought herself a mandate, yes, but also three years more time to negotiate the actual final status deal.
So by the time of the 2022 General Election, there is the opportunity for her to sign a final trade deal with the EU.
It was never going to happen by 2019.
A snap election is a low risk way to maintain and consolidate control, and crucially to buy time.