Adam Boulton: MPs are heading back to Westminster – but are they all keeping an eye on a looming election?
MPs are returning to Westminster on Monday for the rapidly accelerating downhill run to the next general election.
Thanks to Boris Johnson’s success in repealing the Fixed Term Parliament Act there is no precise guidance as to when that date with political destiny will be.
The next general election could even take place the year after next.
If this parliament runs right up to the constitutional buffers, the Commons would be dissolved on 17 December 2024, with the general election taking place no later than 28 January 2025.
Would the Conservatives be wise to campaign for last-gasp re-election through Christmas and the traditional January blues?
Probably not.
The general assumption is that the prime minister will have to screw up his courage and ask the King to call the general election during 2024.
The nation faces months of torrid electioneering until then.
A Sunak win would go against the pattern of history
British politics since 2016 have been dominated by turmoil within the Conservative Party.
It is difficult to boast of any significant achievements by UK plc in that time.
Broken Britain and the Cost Of Living Crisis dominate the public conversation.
Opinion polls are consistently against the Conservatives.
In any case, Sir Anthony Seldon, chronicler of prime ministers, points out for Rishi Sunak to win “would be a unique historic achievement – no party since modern electoral politics were born in 1832 has won a fifth general election in a row”.
Yet that is what the prime minister is attempting.
An immediate Kamikaze early election to get it all over now is not on his agenda.
Sunak wants to celebrate his first anniversary as prime minister on 25 October.
He has just tinkered with a cabinet reshuffle and is planning to host an international conference on Artificial Intelligence as well as a King’s Speech on 7 November.
He spelt out his priorities for the new term before the summer recess in a speech to Tory MPs in the 1922 Committee: “When we come back in September we have a choice to make… do we come together and throw everything at winning the next election or not?
“I’ve made my choice, I’m all in with you to win.”
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Anger over Shapps appointment
By-elections will loom over conference season
Coming together will not be easy in the next few months, not least because MPs will not be legislating together very much.
They will be back at Westminster for barely a fortnight before going into recess until 16 October for an unusually prolonged party conference season.
Further recesses are likely before the King’s speech and for the autumn half-term.
A first order of business next week will be moving the writs – setting the dates – for the two pending by-elections in the seats vacated by Nadine Dorries in Mid-Bedfordshire and by the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier in Rutherglen & West Hamilton.
The results are bound to overshadow the conference season.
The Liberal Democrats meet in Bournemouth in the last week of September, followed in the first half of October by the Conservatives in Manchester, then Labour in Liverpool, and finally the SNP in Aberdeen.
No party can relax about these by-elections.
Expectations are highest for Labour.
Sir Keir Starmer‘s chances of leading a majority government will be boosted if Labour shows it can take back seats from the Scottish nationalists.
Capturing Mid Beds would be a record-breaking result, and act as smashing confirmation of Labour’s standing in the polls and its recent by-election victory in Selby & Ainsty.
Or not.
A split in votes between Labour, Liberal Democrat and independent candidates, could allow the Conservatives to hold on.
This would be a boost for Sunak whatever the underlying realities of the electoral arithmetic.
Tony Blair’s path to Labour’s victory in 1997 was famously likened to “a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”.
Starmer is currently attempting a similar feat.
Sunak’s hope is that some scandal, party row, or misjudgement makes his opponent drop the vase.
But Starmer is stolid and cautious and Labour looks as united as the feuding Tories look disunited.
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Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge
Tories are at loggerheads but will throw everything at it
Sunak hopes to use the legislative agenda to “throw everything” at winning the general election.
That means looking for wedge issues – which could cast the opposition in a bad light.
Unfortunately for him, as was shown in the aftermath of the surprise hanging on of Johnson’s former seat in Uxbridge & South Ruislip, the Conservatives are at loggerheads over what those policies should be.
In the clear-up session this month Tories are tussling in both the Lords and Commons over the Online Harms Bill, the Energy Bill and the proposed changes on housing and river pollution added to the Levelling-Up Bill by Michael Gove.
Conservative factions are also lining up to take each other on at the Conference – #CPC23 to its organisers.
Centrist “One Nation” Tories are rallying in advance while the Conservative Democratic Organisation is holding a black-tie dinner on the opening night in Manchester graced by right-wing luminaries including Priti Patel, Lord Frost and David Campbell Bannerman.
Nadine Dorries and Theresa May will be there too for the launch of their books, attacking the direction of the party from different sides.
Liz Truss, last year’s prime minister, is expected.
Johnson’s attendance plans are not known.
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Sunak will try to dispel divisions in his party with what he puts into his first King’s speech.
The programme for government is likely to be aspirational for the next government rather than offering immediate remedies for the state of the nation, along the lines of the government’s small boats, NHS and crime weeks during the summer break.
The reshuffle appointment of Sunak-loyalist Claire Coutinho as Energy Security Secretary will confirm fears of Conservatives such as Zac Goldsmith that the prime minister will deploy green policy scepticism as a wedge against Labour.
First-term MP Coutinho has no track record on the environment.
PM’s priorities offer a clue to election timing
The prime minister’s five pledges remain his priorities.
The most likely to succeed is halving inflation, or coming close to it.
Little more than warm words are expected in Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement.
By the Budget in March, some Tories think there may be a “soft spot” of economic optimism, allowing Hunt to tee up a spring election.
Most of those calling for this early vote belong to a “things can only get worse” tendency who fear a recession and still more mortgage pain later in 2024.
As they approach the end of their term, incumbent prime ministers often use local elections as a weathervane before calling a general election.
As things stand, Sunak has little to look forward to in next year’s set of elections in predominantly Labour-leaning metropolitan boroughs, featuring 10 high-profile mayoral contests, including in London and Greater Manchester.
A general election at the same time, on 2 May 2024, could soften the blow.
Read more from Adam Boulton
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75 MPs to step down as election looms. Who’s going to replace them?
How Sunak’s California holiday compares with past PMs
Alternatively, if Sunak hesitates and the Conservatives do well against expectations, a June general election could follow.
Sunak’s deputy chief of staff has told his team to enjoy next month’s party conference because it could be the last before the election.
Conventional wisdom at Westminster is that this time next year the general election campaign will be under way – with a vote in October wiping out next year’s costly conference season.
In the most recently reported figures, Labour raised more money from donors than the Conservatives.
There has not been an autumn general election in the UK for 50 years.
Sometimes conventional wisdom can be wrong about the dates and the outcomes of elections.
For example, it cannot take account of external factors.
By next September it should be clearer which way the Ukraine war is heading and whether the United States is poised to re-elect Donald Trump.
We can be certain, however, that British politicians and voters are already caught up in a bitterly contentious long campaign to election day and beyond.
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Politics
Diane’s husband was killed by a reckless driver – the wait for justice was almost as painful
Diane Gall’s husband, Martyn, had been out on a morning bike ride with his friends on their usual route one winter morning in November 2020 – when he was killed by a reckless driver.
Diane and her daughters had to wait almost three years for her husband’s case to be heard in court.
The case was postponed three times, often without warning.
“You just honestly lose faith in the system,” she says.
“You feel there’s a system there that should be there to help and protect victims, to be victims’ voices, but the constant delays really take their toll on individuals and us as a family.”
Diane Gall
The first trial date in April 2022 was cancelled on the day and pushed four months later.
The day before the new date, the family were told it wasn’t going ahead due to the barristers’ strike.
It was moved to November 2022, then postponed again, before eventually being heard in June the following year.
“You’re building yourself up for all these dates, preparing yourself for what you’re going to hear, reliving everything that has happened, and it’s retraumatising,” says Diane.
Diane Gall’s husband, Martyn
‘Radical’ reform needed
Diane’s wait for justice gives us an insight into what thousands of victims and their families are battling every day in a court system cracking under the weight of a record-high backlog.
There are 76,957 cases waiting to be heard in Crown Courts across England and Wales, as of the end of March 2025.
To relieve pressure on the system, an independent review by Sir Brian Leveson last month made a number of recommendations – including creating a new division of the Crown Court known as an intermediate court, made up of a judge and two magistrates, and allowing defendants to choose to be tried by judge alone.
He said only “radical” reform would have an impact.
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Will court reforms tackle backlog?
But according to exclusive data collected for Sky News by the Law Society, there is strong scepticism among the industry about some proposed plans.
Before the review was published, we asked 545 criminal lawyers about the idea of a new tier to the Crown Court – 60% of them told us a type of Intermediate Court was unlikely to reduce the backlog.
“It’s moving a problem from one place to another, like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s not going to do anything,” says Stuart Nolan, chair of the Law Society’s criminal law committee.
“I think the problem with it is lack of resources or lack of will to give the proper resources.
“You can say we need more staff, but they’re not just any staff, they are people with experience and training, and that doesn’t come quickly or cheap.”
Instead, the lawyers told us creating an additional court would harm the quality of justice.
Chloe Jay, senior partner at Shentons Solicitors, agrees the quality of justice will be impacted by a new court division that could sit without a jury for some offences.
She says: “The beauty of the Crown Court is that you have two separate bodies, one deciding the facts and one deciding law.
Casey Jenkins, president of London Criminal Court Solicitors’ Association
“So the jury doesn’t hear the legal arguments about what evidence should be excluded, whether something should be considered as part of the trial, and that’s what really gives you that really good, sound quality of justice, because you haven’t got one person making all the decisions together.
“Potentially in an intermediate court, that is what will happen. The same three people will hear those legal arguments and make the finding of guilt or innocence.”
The most striking finding from the survey is that 73% of criminal lawyers surveyed are worried about offences no longer sitting in front of a jury.
Casey Jenkins, president of London Criminal Court Solicitors’ Association, says this could create unconscious bias.
“There’s a real risk that people from minority backgrounds are negatively impacted by having a trial by a judge and not a jury of their peers who may have the same or similar social background to them,” she says.
“A jury trial is protection against professional judicial decisions by the state. It’s a fundamental right that can be invoked.”
Instead of moving some offences to a new Crown Court tier, our survey suggests criminal lawyers would be more in favour of moving cases to the magistrates instead.
Under the Leveson proposals, trials for offences such as dangerous driving, possessing an offensive weapon and theft could be moved out of the Crown Courts.
‘Catastrophic consequences’
Richard Atkinson, president of the Law Society, says fixing the system will only work with fair funding.
“It’s as important as the NHS, it’s as important as the education system,” he says. “If it crumbles, there will be catastrophic consequences.”
Ms Jenkins agrees that for too long the system has been allowed to fail.
“Everyone deserves justice, this is just not the answer,” she says.
“It’s just the wrong solution to a problem that was caused by chronic, long-term under-investment in the criminal justice system, which is a vital public service.
“The only way to ensure that there’s timely and fair justice for everybody is to invest in all parts of the system from the bottom up: local services, probation, restorative justice, more funding for lawyers so we can give early advice, more funding for the police so that cases are better prepared.”
Government vows ‘bold and ambitious reform’
In response to Sky News’ findings, the minister for courts and legal services, Sarah Sackman KC MP, told Sky News: “We inherited a record and rising court backlog, leaving many victims facing unacceptable delays to see justice done.
“We’ve already boosted funding in our courts system, but the only way out of this crisis is bold and ambitious reform. That is why we are carefully considering Sir Brian’s bold recommendations for long-term change.
“I won’t hesitate to do whatever needs to be done for the benefit of victims.”
The driver that killed Diane’s husband was eventually convicted. She wants those making decisions about the court system to remember those impacted the most in every case.
Every victim and every family.
“You do just feel like a cog in a big wheel that’s out of your control,” she says. “Because you know justice delayed is justice denied.”
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