Terry Prone: Will Simon Harris call an early election? It proved disastrous across the water
Early” Of Have Lose The To Many Little Harris People Want “go Who Simon To
It’s like when politicians caught in the wrong bed say they’re resigning so as not to be a distraction and to spend more time with their families.
When a political party that was expected to do well does badly, the first thing they say is that they’re listening. They’re listening, right now. They’re going to listen from now on. All ears like a donkey, they are.
Mary Lou is currently pushing the donkey line with admirable commitment, oblivious, it would seem, to the reality that listening is a continuum in politics. It’s the permanent obligation.
Our current Taoiseach, for example, can talk on any platform. Push his “speak” button and out pour the words. But he still manages to listen more than he speaks — and to retain what’s said to him. Three years after someone offers him advice, he’ll quote it back to them. Verbatim.
Right now, it’s fair to assume that a constant stream of stuff going in one of his ears — and hopefully, right out the other — is advice that he should cut and run. Call a snap election. Go to the country. Capitalize on positive local election results. Avoid the Ides of March and their cold dark evenings.
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An interesting commonality links many of the people who want Simon Harris to “go early”. They have little to lose, those people, who include, let’s be fair, a large bunch of journalists, who are, by their nature, avoidant of routine.
Routine doesn’t give you a front page or six million “likes”. Journalists are adrenalin addicts, hooked on being the first to know, on being in the inside circle, on that thrilling sensation of skin-prickles all over at the prospect of victories and defeats turning into copy.
It’s not that us hacks are heartless. But the reality of our trade is that during an election the real people who go in for politics transform into characters in a morality play and we’re in charge of their entrances and exits.
We’re the ones who report their tears, not the ones who wipe them. So it’s easy for us, if not inevitable for us, to want the earliest election possible, ideally directly after a budget we can sniff at for being a “giveaway to buy the electorate”.
The thing about the people pushing giveaway budgets and snap elections is that they’re not much into precedent. They’re in love with theories that meet their particular prejudices, but they don’t kill themselves finding supportive evidence.
They don’t ask the question: “Has any government that called a snap election profited thereby?”
Pat Rabbitte, on radio at the weekend, thought maybe it had worked for a Sean Lemass administration. In other words, no shining example occurred to this veteran since the middle of the last century. And yet, the “go early” boys will keep pushing the Taoiseach, whose call it is. (No point in pushing Micheál Martin, who never saw an opinion poll or an early election he liked.)
Calling an early election proved disastrous for Theresa May, across the water, in April 2017. She was advised that the electorate wanted the stability of a solid government. They may have, but not hers.
The local and European elections were distinguished by the loopy promises being made by candidates whose grasp of public administration might be a tad tenuous. You had MEP candidates promising to appoint ministers for this and that, which of course, if elected, they wouldn’t actually be able to do.
None of the Government parties promised that much, other than Harris promising energy. The truth of it is that the electorate wasn’t bought and paid for. They voted for candidates who had performed well up to now — The Incumbency Factor.
They voted for people who’d been rejected and who they felt deserved another go. They voted for voices and faces they knew and/or trusted. They made sensible use of the franchise, in other words.
The urge to go early ignores that varied pattern of analysis and action, opting, instead, for the cruder notion of clumping the electorate into one grasping cluster, into the open mouths of which should be stuffed a giveaway budget.
If deployed, this will fail for two reasons.
- The immediate coverage will be contemptuous, not just of the givers, but, more significantly, of the receivers. Many voters will take what’s on offer and then demonstrate that they can’t be bought by voting the other way.
- Public administration is so structured, these days, that giveaways which would make a sizeable immediate difference as difficult to achieve. Abandoning rates, as Fianna Fáil did in the 70s, was a once-off. A once-off with trailing wires, but that’s another story.
An additional reason adduced for the cut-and-run approach takes the form of a fruit-flavoured health warning: Better go now, because the government might encounter a banana skin.
The banana skin argument misses the point that voters love to see Governments coping with challenge. Witness Leo’s popularity at the outbreak of covid-19. It also misses the point that nobody has any control over the timing of banana skins. One could manifest itself right in the middle of the campaign.
Old timers know that every day in office, every day on the job, pays one more installment of the mortgage and adds a few more quid into the pension. That, plus data, will motivate them to argue strongly against those dying for a speedy general election.
The political march of folly suggests the “go early” crowd will win.