What are the chances of a May general election?

Rishi Sunak might be hoping for a post-Budget boost but voters are running out of patience, as Sean O’Grady explains

Don’t bet on a January 2025 election (Ben Birchall/PA Wire)

A prime minister’s prerogative to dissolve parliament and call an election – restored after the 2019 general election and its chaotic prelude – is usually considered a great political advantage. Although more constrained these days by an operationally independent Bank of England, and the Office for Budget Responsibility, a cynical prime minister and conniving chancellor of the Exchequer can still engineer a pre-election boomlet to maximise party political advantage. Yet that very freedom is currently acting as a destabilising influence. Speculation about election dates persists, despite attempts to dampen it down…

Will there be a May general election?

Even though Rishi Sunak has publicly ruled it out, speculation has persisted. Before the new year, Labour figures were openly speculating that there’d be an election in May, hard on the heels of Wednesday’s tax-cutting Budget. Labour may have wanted to create momentum to make Sunak look as if he’d “bottled it” in the event of going for an autumn date instead. So, early this year Sunak stated: “My working assumption is we will have a general election in the second half of this year because, in the meantime, I have lots I want to get on with … I want to keep going, managing the economy well and cutting people’s taxes ... I’ve got lots to get on with.”