Will there be a general election this year?

Britain is facing the prospect of another general election less than a year since Theresa May’s snap vote ended with her losing her majority.

The Sunday Times caused something of a stir at Westminster this weekend with a report claiming that growing numbers of Conservative MPs are preparing for an autumn contest.

These Tories “fear that the Brexit deadlock will soon become ‘insurmountable for the prime minister’”, according to the newspaper.

MPs are said to fear that if the Government is defeated on its EU customs plans, there will have to be a motion of confidence in the PM, and a likely election as a result.

One unnamed Tory Brexiteer told The Sunday Times that he could not see how the Government could “square the circle” and come up with a solution on Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU that would appease both Tory Remainers and Leavers.

“The numbers are against us [Brexiteers] and if we face repeated defeats when the Withdrawal Bill returns to the Commons, the only alternative will be to kick over the table and trigger a vote of no confidence in the prime minister, which will likely lead to another general election,” the MP said.

But while “the Conservatives have, in recent months, re-established a small but consistent lead in the four- to five-point mark, the spectre of what happened to a far bigger lead last time is on almost every Tory mind”, says the New Statesman.

What’s prompted the speculation?

“Brexit is the real driving force behind speculation about an early election,” writes Tony Blair’s former advisor John McTernan in an article for Prospect magazine. “Even those most committed to not reading or thinking about politics - or to give them their technical name, ‘normal people’ - will have realised that something is going wrong with Brexit.”

There is also “a sort of political subconscious at work here”, says George Trefgarne in The Spectator. “I suspect plenty of Tory MPs secretly think that the local election result shows that Jeremy Corbyn is beatable, if only the Conservatives could find themselves a leader capable of articulating a positive vision for the country,” he continues.

The Times’s Henry Zeffman argues that the prospect of an autumn election is unlikely, but adds that “to watch pro-EU Tories wage their lonely fight on the green benches is to be reminded that the split [in the party over Europe] will endure”.

He concedes: “Europe brought down David Cameron and played a role in the downfall of John Major and Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps it isn’t that much of a stretch for the turmoil unleashed at the polls in June 2016 to force May back before the people.”

So will it happen?

Under the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act, there are two current scenarios in which an election could be called. The first, hypothetical situation “is that May is brought down by her Brexiteers and that this precipitates a general election”, says McTernan. “The second is that parliamentary deadlock forces her into calling the vote herself.”

A new election “is not certain to fix the Leavers’ central problem, which is the shortage of parliamentary numbers for their preferred exit”, says the Financial Times’s Janan Ganesh. But the potential is there, he adds, not least because of two factors that are in the Leavers’ favour now but may not be in a few years.

“One is material. The economy is just about still growing, with wages rising ahead of inflation,” Ganesh writes. “The other tailwind is political. The opposition Labour Party still wants to leave the single market. But that might not last forever.”

The Brexiteers “are in parliamentary trouble because the opposition line is already softer than it was at the turn of the year. If it softens much more, a hard exit becomes a fringe prospect”, he says.

“In other words, this apparent rough patch for Leavers is, on second glance, much better than things might be in the near future”, which makes a deposition of May more likely.

However, even if the Brexiteers were to push to remove May, it is likely she would win any vote of confidence, since “no Remainer Tory MP is ever going to bring down their own government and allow Jeremy Corbyn a sniff of power”, says HuffPost’s Paul Waugh.

And although “the local elections weren’t the disaster many Tories had feared they would be, the Conservatives remain unsure that they would win many more seats were there a general election tomorrow”, says The Spectator’s Katy Balls.

Indeed, one Tory MP told The Times: “Some Brexiteers are trying to suggest that the PM will need to call an election in order to force through the customs union position. Not going to happen. Even if she wanted to – which I'm very reliably informed she would refuse to do – there would be huge resistance to it from the majority of the parliamentary party.”

They may not have a choice, says the New Statesman. Labour will almost certainly vote against the EU Withdrawal Bill, and “the question then becomes whether or not Theresa May can negotiate a Brexit deal that unites the whole of the Conservative Party”.

A defeat over the Brexit deal would be difficult to survive for May. “The margins are very fine, and an election that no Conservative really wants might yet be forced upon them,” the magazine concludes.