A week is a long time in politics.....

...is probably the best way of summing up what's been happening over the last week - so it's back to business as normal, or at least as normal as life at Westminster can ever be!

Should there be fixed term elections? The conventional argument in favour is that there ought to be, because it gives the government of the day too much power to choose an election date to suit it; and the conventional wisdom is that no government when in power will actually agree to give up the power to set an election date, precisely because of the advantage that it is supposed to give.

But given what has happened over the last week or so, I wonder if being able to fix an election date is really such an advantage to a sitting government? Looking back over recent decades, Prime Ministers in power don't really seem to have done too well in using this power to their advantage. Gordon Brown did announce before the summer that he was in favour of giving the effective right to dissolve Parliament to Parliament itself, rather than the Prime Minister. This was announced in the government's proposals on the Governance of Britain - so the issue of fixed term elections is bound to come up during the discussions and debates on these proposals over the next few months.
POSTCRIPT: I see Labour's Deputy Leader Harriet Harman has been raising the issue as well.