BORIS JOHNSON: When elections are being scrapped by the ruling celebration, what is the distinction between Britain and an African dictatorship?

Oh come off it! Pull the other one, darling. It’s got bells on. In trying to justify their decision to cancel elections next year, the Labour Government has just descended to complete absurdity.

As far as I understand Sir Chris Bryant, the minister responsible – and a man hitherto most famous for baffling the internet by posing in his underpants, the decision is no longer in the hands of the Government. It is being delegated to ‘local people’.

And, er, which local people will be entrusted with working out whether or not local councillors should be subject to election next year? It’s the local councillors themselves! Genius!

What do you think they will decide to do, given the choice? They can stay in office for another year and continue to luxuriate in the perks and privileges of the job. They can hope that something will turn up in the 12 months that follow, and that their poll ratings will improve.

Or else they can submit now to the rigours and embarrassments of an election campaign, followed by brutal ejection from office.

Tough one, eh? On the whole, I expect that most of them will decide that Labour is right and that these elections are a tiresome distraction. 

The whole thing is absolutely outrageous. There has been nothing like it in peacetime history.

Asked by one interviewer to explain what the hell was going on, Sir Chris reminded him that there had been no elections in the UK throughout the Second World War. Well, Pants-man is right about that – but unless I have missed something, this country is not at war.

Sir Chris Bryant reminded one interviewer there were no elections during the Second World War

We do not have millions of men and women under arms, or overseas. We are not in the midst of a pandemic, or anything else that might prevent people from getting to the polls.

Yes, we are going through one of our regular reorganisations of local government – but nothing that should prevent the sovereign people from voting.

I have a background in local government, and I remember that the May 2012 London Mayor elections were extremely difficult. We were in the final throes of trying to get our great capital ready for the Olympic Games. It was highly complicated and time-consuming work.

Did I want to down tools, and fight an election? Not on your Nelly. We were at the height of pre-Olympic public fury with the whole thing – the expense, the disruption, the Zil lanes for the world’s sporting bureaucrats.

To make matters worse, we Tories were about 15 points behind in the London opinion polls, and we had just had an ‘omnishambles’ Budget that put up taxes on Cornish pasties, among other injustices.

Of course I would have loved to postpone the election. Of course, it would have been more comfortable to sort out the Olympics, and then go to the polls, bathed in the afterglow of success. But the idea didn’t even cross our minds.

It was unthinkable – because it would have been so obviously anti-democratic. One of the many things that make this country so wonderful is that we do not – or at least not until now – allow elections to be cancelled for the convenience of politicians.

The Labour Government says that the cancellation is necessary, to allow the creation of unitary council authorities. What rubbish. In the 80 years since the Second World War we have had umpteen reforms, with all manner of tiers of government called into being or destroyed (it always ends in tiers!).

Labour are cancelling next year’s local elections because they think those elections will go badly against them, and that Keir Starmer will finally lose his grip on power, writes Boris Johnson

We have had a dizzying variety of regional and local authorities and assemblies and parliaments. We have constantly rejigged the boundaries – and yet we have never cancelled an election because of a reorganisation of councils.

In 2019, under the admittedly uber-punctilious Theresa May, we even asked the British people to vote in the elections to the European parliament, when Britain had just voted to leave the EU. Those elections were absurd, and pointless, and yet we went ahead.

So why are we cancelling these elections – which affect our schools, our roads, our drains, our council tax, our daily lives? It is not as if the administrative changes are hard to implement, because these reforms are not even especially bold or imaginative. They will do nothing to address the biggest problem of local government, namely the chaotic interface between the NHS and social care provision.

Local councils live in a permanent state of resentment of the NHS, because they have to make provision for the unpredictable but always huge and growing number of elderly people who are discharged into their care.

Meanwhile, hospital managers always blame local government for the acute sector beds that are full, right now, of elderly people who do not need to be there, but who cannot get the right social care provision. Until we fix that fundamental problem – that we have a national health service, and local social services – then all local government reform is just deckchair-shuffling. No, my friends: Chris Bryant can say what he likes, but the public can see what is really going on here. Labour has chosen to postpone these elections because they are terrified, rightly, of the thrashing that the electorate would otherwise deliver.

They are running away from the voters. They are frit. They are cancelling next year’s local elections – and depriving perhaps ten million people of the vote, in as many as 63 authorities – because they think those elections will go badly against them, and that Keir Starmer will finally lose his grip on power.

This isn’t being done for the sake of local government reform, or for the voters themselves. It is being done for the sake of the Labour Party – and it stinks to high heaven.

It makes me furious, because if we postpone elections, for the advantage of the ruling party, then what is the difference between the UK and Senegal, or Mali? There are people around the world – and not just JD Vance – who say we are already starting to look like Putin’s Russia.

I have been in Japan and was dismayed when a highly knowledgeable woman claimed that Britain and Russia were now equally bad at upholding free speech. Common sense tells us that this is just not true. On any rational assessment the two political systems are completely different, and ours is infinitely better.

Whatever his faults, Starmer does not cause journalists to be shot; he does not murder his opponents or send them to forced labour camps.

But is it any wonder that people around the world – even lifelong fans of Britain – are starting to get muddled?

Our police now regularly arrest people just for saying things on Twitter, when they should be jailing shoplifters. We have a national broadcaster that has been caught bang to rights in an attempt to doctor the words of the US President.

And now we have a Labour Government that is blatantly cancelling elections in May next year because they think that they will lose.

That’s what dictators do. That’s the kind of thing Putin does. In trying to pretend that this is some kind of bureaucratic necessity, Bryant is guilty of an infuriating attempt at deception.

It won’t work. This time he not only looks ridiculous. This time his pants are visibly on fire.