Peers are playing into Sunak’s hands - his threat proved it, says Nigel Nelson

It’s why a General Election in May is still on the cards. But the wheel in motion for this one may rely on the Lords doing what peers think the PM doesn’t want them to do.

Elections are like comedy. Timing is all. Gordon Brown should have gone to the country in 2007 after snaffling No10 from Tony Blair. He was riding the crest of a popularity wave in his first Summer as premier, sure-footed in handling a couple of car bombs in London and one in Glasgow, and flooding elsewhere, and some deft legwork during the foot-and-mouth crisis.

Saatchi & Saatchi’s brilliant ‘Not Flash, just Gordon’ ad campaign ramped up speculation it was the opening salvo for a mid-term ballot which it was. And Brown was forever dogged by accusations of dither when he changed his mind. His poll ratings never recovered, and David Cameron pipped him to the post in 2010.

While Gordon Brown’s mistake was not calling an election, Theresa May’s error was holding one. And in 2017 she didn’t half get her timing wrong. She lost 23 MPs and, two years later, her job.

When David Cameron became PM it looked like he was giving away the leg up he inherited by introducing the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. This set in stone the General Election date for the first Thursday in May, precisely five years after the previous one.

The FTPA was a comfort blanket thrown around Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats to show that Cameron was serious about coalition. It was also a bit of a con. The get-out was that it only needed two-thirds of MPs to vote for an election any time the PM suggested it. As no opposition would ever dare refuse one, it made the FTPA meaningless. Its repeal in 2022 was barely noticed.

The last date on which Rishi Sunak can hold the election is 28 January, 2025, and he says, in any event, not to expect one before the second half of this year. But this could be to muddy the waters.

Sunak has been carefully laying the groundwork for May 2, the same day councils go the the polls. He wants cross-Channel asylum seekers to be hoofed to Rwanda by then. One plane with just one migrant aboard would tick the box.

• Brussels is braced for a far-right takeover - it could tear the EU apart
• Labour's Jonathan Ashworth slams 'circular firing squad' in the Tory party
• 'You should be ashamed!' Priti Patel heckled as MP mobbed by furious eco-zealots

The £450 a month National Insurance cut was rushed through this month so workers can enjoy the bounce in their pay packets for at least four months before casting their votes.

And Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is promising more election sweetening tax cuts in his March 6th Budget, giving Mr Sunak a comfortable two weeks following that to fire the campaign starting gun.

Oh, and local authorities not due to hold elections on May 2 are being asked about the availability of their polling stations anyway. Bit suspicious, right?

Now this doesn’t make May 2 a certainty. If three weeks into March the opinion polls show the Tories still 20 points or more behind Labour it’s not going to happen. That’ll mean October or November instead.

But this is where the Lords might come in. Early indications show they intend to keep playing footsie with the Rwanda Bill to keep it kicking around Parliament long after May. Their lordships could be in for a surprise.

Sunak gave a weird press conference last week in which he posed a question which should have peers quaking in their ermine. He asked: “Will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected House?”

Note the use of “appointed” in the same sentence as “elected”. This is an unspecified threat to the House of Lords that if they don’t play ball they’re the ones who could be sent off.

Should bundling migrants off to Rwanda turn out to be as popular as Sunak thinks it is, this could turn the polls around.

A May election would be about who should govern Britain. The MPs we vote for - or legislators in Parliament only because 92 have inherited a title, 26 wear pointy hats as Church of England bishops, and the remainder found the only retirement home serving best Stilton and a decent Claret.

Sunak would need a plan to reform the Lords to pop into the Conservative manifesto, and if one isn’t oven ready he could always nick Keir Starmer’s - an upper House renamed the Assembly of Nations and Regions with 200 elected members.

The Labour leader was quietly hoping to kick this one into the long grass, acutely aware of the warning of “unpredictable consequences” by Tory grandee John Wakeham in his 1999 Royal Commission into Lords reform.

Scrapping the rights of bishops to sit as lawmakers could see the separation of Church and State which would undermine the Crown. Getting rid of the hereditary principle wouldn’t do the Monarchy any favours either.

But when you’re as desperate as Rishi Sunak, perhaps it seems worth turning your King into a sacrificial pawn.