Only a few days to go to the “off”

It looks as though the phoney war is nearly over. According to the BBC’s Political Editor, Andrew Marr, Tony Blair is likely to name 5 May as election day when Parliament returns from its Easter break.

Andrew Marr says Mr Blair will ask the Queen on 4 or 5 April to dissolve Parliament at the end of that week.

Although everybody is saying that May 5th is a certainty – and it clearly looks that way – we won’t be totally convinced until we get the formal announcement.

Those of us long enough in the tooth will recall October 1978 when the then Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, was booked to make a live statement on all the TV channels and everybody was geared up for an election date announcement. Well he did talk about the date but it was not going to be that year.

Very recently we had what appeared to be deception over an election date. In September last year there was widespread briefing from Downing Street that the Hartlepool by-election would take place on October 7th. A few days later came the news that it had been called for September 30 in a move widely believed to have been designed to trip up the Lib Dems.

If you are convinced you can still get 1/10 with Betfair on it being on May 5th.

© Mike Smithson 2005