Boris Johnson’s Election Bid In Doubt Amid No-Deal Brexit Threat

(Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's bid for a snap election on Dec. 12 was up in the air after his opponents said they want to rule out a no-deal Brexit first.

Johnson announced that a motion to trigger an early poll will be put to a vote in the House of Commons on Monday. It will require two-thirds of members of Parliament to support the proposal for the election to take place.

But the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, late Thursday said he wanted to see if the EU offered an extension before making a decision. “Take no deal off the table and we will absolutely support an election,” he said.

If Johnson succeeds, there is a chance MPs could speed his Brexit deal into law before Parliament is dissolved for the campaign to begin on Nov 6. That would mean the U.K. would be out of the European Union before voters go to the polling stations.

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The U.K. Treasury canceled plans for a Nov. 6 Budget following Johnson's election proposal. Chancellor Sajid Javid had previously said he would only hold the Budget on that day if the U.K. had left the EU with a deal.

EU officials said while it's still most likely the bloc will grant a delay until Jan. 31, the discussion between Brussels and the bloc's other 27 governments is still going on and Johnson's election call -- and Labour's possible rejection of it -- is now complicating matters.

One decision to make could be whether, if a deal is passed by Nov. 6, as Johnson wants, the EU would then see Brexit happen on Nov. 30 or Nov. 15, the officials said.

‘End this nightmare'

“It is our duty to end this nightmare and provide the country with a solution as soon as we reasonably can,” Johnson said in a letter to Corbyn, appealing for his MPs to back an election. “These repeated delays have been bad for the economy, bad for businesses, and bad for millions of people trying to plan their futures.”

It would be the third general election the U.K. has been through in four years, and the second since the seismic shift in British politics from the 2016 referendum vote. In a political context of extreme volatility, the contest will be difficult to predict.

The Brexit referendum split the country and redrew the political debate, breaking the old party structures that have held sway in the U.K. for decades. In 2017, Johnson's predecessor Theresa May called an early election with her party 25 points ahead of Labour in the opinion polls.

Crisis Britain

Instead of reaping the landslide she had expected, May lost the slim majority she started with, paralyzing Parliament and plunging Britain into a political and constitutional crisis in which it remains.

In an initial response to Johnson's plan, Labour said it will back an election once a no-deal Brexit has been ruled out, and if the EU grants the U.K. an extension to the Oct. 31 deadline. The EU is widely expected to agree to a three-month delay when ambassadors meet in Brussels on Friday, putting back the U.K.'s exit until Jan. 31.

Johnson told Corbyn he would prefer a short extension to the deadline until the middle of November but expected the EU to require a longer delay until the end of January. In those circumstances, an election would be essential, he said.

January Brexit

“If I win a majority in this election, we will then ratify this great new deal that I have negotiated, get Brexit done in January and the country will move on,” Johnson wrote to Corbyn. “If you win a majority, then you will, I assume, implement your policy: that is, you will ask for another delay after 31 January 2020 to give you the time both to renegotiate a new deal then have a referendum, in which you may or may not campaign for your own deal.”

Johnson will need two-thirds of MPs in the Commons to back the motion on Monday, giving Labour an effective veto if all of its 245 members refuse. He's twice failed to win Parliament's support for an early national vote.

If MPs reject his plan, Johnson will ditch his Brexit bill and campaign relentlessly for an election, which he sees as the only way to break the impasse, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

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Johnson pledged “do or die” to get Brexit done by the existing deadline of Oct. 31, and tried to get parliamentary approval for an accelerated timetable to pass his agreement into U.K. law. MPs voted in favor of the deal in principle -- but rejected a fast-track plan to rush the deal into law in just three days of Commons debates, leaving the U.K.'s European divorce stuck.

Johnson was required to seek a Brexit extension to Jan. 31 when he failed to get a deal through Parliament by Oct. 19 and the EU is due to give its formal response on Friday morning.

--With assistance from Stuart Biggs and Greg Ritchie.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jessica Shankleman in London at jshankleman@bloomberg.net;Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net;Ian Wishart in Brussels at iwishart@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny