Andrew Tickell: All I want for Christmas is ... a winter election?

During this shortest day in the solar year, the craturs of the Arctic will be left to twiddle their paws – or catch up on Netflix – in near total darkness for 24 hours. If the evidence of the past few Decembers is anything to go by, the experience for those of us living in Scotland will scarce be brighter.

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Of all the weather this country has to offer, most of all I hate a grey summer evening in Scotland, with its tepid rain and interminable days stretching out under slate skies. Instead, give me any of the cold yellow days of autumn, the gutters kicking up ambers and auburns. Give me knuckle-cracking winter cold or even rain by the bucket.

This is possibly a tragic worldview, but there’s no autumn or winter weather, however ghastly, which can make me melancholy. Come smirr, come hail, come sleet and snow: the battering of the elements seems weirdly affirmative, somehow. For me, the darkness of our December days feels embracing rather than gloomy. But after 30 years of experience, I’d argue that affirmative feeling is best experienced indoors, with a good book and the central heating turned up to 11.

The long, slow simmering of some tough corner of an animal into a rich and deep stew on the hob. The puff of yeast from new bread rising. The room-filling exhalation when an Islay malt is cracked open, and the second breath, as the hot peated spirit spits and smokes as it hits the palette. These are winter’s pleasures in Scotland.

Chief among the pleasures of the deep midwinter are not: chapping on unanswered doors, getting bollocked by strangers at -3C, your digits being gnawed off by house-proud dogs playing sentinel by the letterbox, getting lost in unfamiliar neighbourhoods, slipping on ice, forging through the night to deliver increasingly damp leaflets, crawling up damp tenement stairwells, breath freezing on the air, sweat running down the back of your cagoule, feeling in your fingertips fading, as the weather turns Himalayan and frosty winds make one hell of a moan.

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Let the Westminster choir sing: “On the 12th day of Christmas the alienated father of my love child gave to me – 12 ERG-ers chunt’ring, 11 vipers vipering, 10 union flags a’flying, nine – no – eight meaningful votes, seven Rees-Moggs mogging, six alleged a-layings, five Queen’s speeches, four Surrender Acts, three Staunchly British hens, two Brexit deals, and a F-ing General Election.”

Unfortunately, yaks and kindly Sherpas are not standard-issue equipment for political activists in Scotland. And unfortunately, Boris Johnson now has his heart set on a December 12 General Election – just 10 days shy of 2019’s shortest day. Johnson now has visions of finding the road to Brexit in the dark woods of December.

Boris Johnson is seeking a December 12 election

I appreciate London isn’t quite as nippy as Scotland tends to be at this time of year, but chilblained political activists will be contemplating the idea of a winter election with limited enthusiasm. One Labour campaigner I meet suggests that “an ultra-low spending limit” should be imposed on this poll – just enough to cover the freepost mailshot for the hardier postmen of Britain to deliver, to spare campaigners the frostbite. Many voters will be contemplating the prospect of a new election with similar queasiness.

But in the end – beyond the UK being escorted to the EU exit door by President Macron next Thursday – an election looks like the only way capable of resolving the present impasse gripping Westminster, for good or for ill. The only real question is when – rather than whether – a new UK Parliament should be selected and reconvened.

While I understand and applaud the mighty efforts people like Joanna Cherry and others have put into trying to prevent the UK tumbling out of the EU without a deal, this has always been a holding position. This holding position must always, in time, have given way to a more lasting determination of how the United Kingdom wishes to relate to the rest of Europe after 2016’s Brexit vote. And supporters of Scottish independence will find themselves cutting their cloth and refining their arguments accordingly.

Of course, Johnson may not get his way next week. Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, any motion for an early election needs to win the support of two thirds of MPs to carry. What is less obvious is the strength of the political calculation underpinning the new Prime Minister’s December gambit. The news out of Westminster this week, and particularly its Tory circles, is queasy, and understandably so.

All the Prime Minister wants for Christmas is the workable Tory majority which eluded Theresa May in 2017, after she “crushed the saboteurs” and took the party from 330 seats in the House of Commons to 317. Until the confusions and contradictions of this week in Parliament, agree with it or disagree with it, Boris Johnson had a simple but fairly focused message. Labour remains in an addled, self-defeating, factional mess. Brexiteers, rally behind me. I’m your bulldog man, your champion. Le Brexit, c’est moi.

BUT this was a week when the confusing got even more confused. In Brexit Britain, we’re meant to believe the House of Commons is both a zombie legislature and the setting for an exciting and zesty domestic agenda for the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister both wants to focus on that domestic agenda and refuses to do anything about it unless MPs sign his blank Brexit cheque with no scrutiny. There is, and isn’t, going to be a new budget which is, and isn’t, going to outline Britain’s bold new future outside the EU. We’re meant to imagine Boris Johnson both does, and doesn’t want an election. This isn’t creative ambiguity. It’s government by schizophrenia, where Jekyll says he’s Hyde, and vice versa. It feels directionless and confused.

The unavoidable fact is this: Boris was unprepared to give his last full measure of devotion for Brexit. Inspect the country’s ditches. You’ll find no sign of Johnson’s muddy pow lying down amid the bracken. Instead of the stout resistance he promised, the Prime Minister meekly sent the extension request off to Brussels. Millions of pounds worth of public money were wasted on a PR exercise, pretending Britain would be leaving the EU by October 31.

The obvious consequence is this. If there is a General Election before Britain leaves the European Union, the Tories are exposed to being cannibalised by Nigel Farage’s crew and exposed to significant losses in the south west of England – and in Scotland too. For Johnson, there’s every possibility that the losses are guaranteed and the gains prove elusive.

Lest we forget, the Scottish results in 2017 flattered Theresa May. The 12 gains made by the party formerly known as the Ruth Davidson for a Strong Opposition and/or First Minister Party made up critical ground lost by the Tories elsewhere in the UK. And what a supinely reliable band they have proved. While the DUP and Tories from the rest of the UK veered all over the map in their support and rejection of successive Brexit deals brought back from Europe by Theresa May and then Boris Johnson, en bloc, the Scottish Tories have seemed prepared to sink whatever the Downing Street line happens to be on any given day, without a peep of dissent.

A year ago, on their own initiative, David Mundell and Ruth Davidson sent Theresa May a letter. This letter said the pair “could not support any deal that creates a border of any kind in the Irish Sea and undermines the Union or leads to Northern Ireland having a different relationship with the EU than the rest of the UK, beyond what currently exists.” For Davidson, this was a “red line”. Mundell, we were told, would be considering his position if confronted with any deal which would “undermine the Union”.

Needless to say – having been unable to avoid a sacking as the UK Government’s chief panjandrum for Scotland – Mundell didn’t resign. Instead, as a plain backbencher, he voted in favour of just such a deal in the Commons last week, with the DUP in uproar, and cartographers picking out a new frontier between Ireland and Britain between the northern channel and St George’s. Ruth Davidson was, presumably, too busy exploring opportunities for enrichment in the private sector to notice this development. No reversal, no indignity, it seems, is too much to pay to our Precious Union™. We’ll see if most of the Scottish electorate agree.

I’ve given up making predictions about English politics. The electorate’s impulses south of the Border feel increasingly a world apart. All I’ll commit to is this. It takes a bold man to predict the evening’s weather on a winter morning. Given all of Corbyn’s weaknesses and confusions, given the mendacity, incompetence and naked malice of this Tory administration, it’d take a bolder man still to call how a December election would land.