Even the Tories aren't ready to fight a general election. Boris Johnson starts his campaign with his party divided

The prime minister is struggling to convince his own MPs – as well as voters – that this election is strictly necessary to deliver Brexit

I asked a Conservative MP if he was looking forward to the election and he did that thing, which is surprisingly difficult, of saying “yes” cheerfully and shaking his head.

This is the election no one wants. Two-thirds of MPs voted for it, paradoxically. They wouldn’t vote for it on Monday, when a two-thirds majority was required, meaning 434 MPs. But on Tuesday, once the EU had published its decision to postpone Brexit and the election date was fixed in law for 12 December, 437 or 438 MPs – the numbers do not add up on parliament’s website – passed the bill.

But Anna Soubry, leader of the five-strong Independent Group for Change, was probably right when she said, after the vote, that, “in private … the majority of backbenchers on both sides do not want a general election”. They voted for it mainly because their party leaders thought it was in their interest to do so.

That spells danger for the prime minister. The first question that voters ask, when an election is held earlier than law or convention requires, is, “Why are you bothering us now?” An unsatisfactory answer didn’t work out well for Ted Heath in 1974 or Theresa May in 2017.

That is why Boris Johnson has to explain why we need an election now, and so far he has not been totally convincing.

The prime minister said on Tuesday that he had offered more time to get his Brexit deal through parliament, but the leader of the opposition had refused and “we are left with no choice but to go to the country to break free from this impasse”.

But is that true? There is enough doubt about it to make the launch of the election campaign mushy. The question is not whether Jeremy Corbyn would agree to more time, but whether Johnson could reverse the majority of 15 in the Commons that voted against the rushed timetable to get the Brexit bill through before Thursday’s deadline.

All he had to do was to persuade eight MPs who voted against that timetable to vote for a new, more generous one. As it was, six of them signed a motion asking for a 14-day timetable, and Alan Wager of King’s College London argues that at least another two MPs would have voted for it – Stephen Lloyd and Rory Stewart.

I suspect we will never know. Lloyd, the independent MP for Eastbourne, has now rejoined the Liberal Democrats and will be campaigning for Remain in this election, while Stewart wants to be the independent mayor of London, the Remain city.

And even if Johnson could have got the legislation through, it might have been amended, although Wager rightly suggests that none of the amendments would have been fatal to the bill – the referendum amendment, in particular, did not have sufficient support.

But the prime minister never pushed it to a vote, to test whether or not he could capitalise on the majority in principle that he had secured for his Brexit deal in parliament. As Wager says, he chose, “to the consternation of many in his own party”, to go for an election instead.

There may be cynical reasons for that: it may be his best chance of securing a personal mandate for the next five years.

But the idea that he did not need to have an election has undermined morale among his own MPs and party activists at the very moment when he needs them to be fired up and ready to go. And if the idea takes hold among the voters, it means his election campaign is trying to get off the ground with ice on the wings.