Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectators' Daily Politics podcast. I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth. So are we heading for an early general election? It seems that civil servants might be preparing to do so. A report in the Daily Mail today said that Mark said well, the cabinet secretary has been briefing his permanent secretaries that there might be preparing to do so. A report in the Daily Mail today said that Mark said well,

the cabinet secretary has been briefing his permanent secretaries that there might be an early

election. James, what's going on here? So the theory goes like this, which is if these cross-party

talks can't find any basis of agreement and if you consider that Theresa Maynees 116 more votes, you're not going to get

those votes from the Labour side without the active assent of the Labour front bench. And Jeremy

Corbyn has said he won't meet with Theresa May until she rules out no deal, something that she

doesn't want to do, it doesn't feel she can do, you could end up with a complete logjam

where nothing can get through. What happens when there's a complete logjam? There's a general

election. And I was struck yesterday how calling around cabinet ministers, lots of people who

previously had thought that the one thing that wasn't going to happen was a general election,

now think that

there might end up having to be one because you might get to a position of complete status in Parliament

and it might be the only way out of this deadlock because, you know, a general election might result

in a definitive majority one way or the other. A general election might make the DUP less

important, all sorts of things like that. I think there is obviously a massive problem for the Tory

party, which is what would be their position on Brexit going into that election? And how do you

deal with the fact that the election wouldn't solve anything on the Tory side

unless, you know, every Tory MP signed up in blood to being prepared to back the policy

in the manifesto?

And if they won't, you know, are we really going to get to a situation where Theresa May is going to deselect

Boris Johnson because he won't sign up to that?

No, I did have one figure, jokingly, you could call it, point out that actually a general

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