Unlike Mr Nicholas Soames, I have contemplated resigning my position but, like Mr Soames, have decided against, on the basis that I was at least half-right in foreseeing that the Government would lose its majority and that no one can be right about everything.At this time of the week, just after a by-election, some of my colleagues extract an article from a drawer, dust it down, write a new beginning and a new end, add a few names, change some dates, and put it in the paper under a title like “Why By- elections Don’t Really Tell Us Anything”. The Times has a particularly trusty old model which it wheels out on these occasions to display in its leader column.I have never subscribed to this view I do not believe it is true. Manifestly some by-elections do produce substantial, even cataclysmic political effects. It is not so much that the party which won goes on to retain the seat at the general election – though Mr Simon Hughes, for one, still represents the seat he secured at a by-election 14 years ago It is, rather, that the political weather is changed. For instance, Lady Thatcher fell partly because the Conservatives had lost Eastbourne in October, and polled disastrously in Bootle and Bradford North early in November.It is, however, a myth that Harold Wilson went to the country in March 1966 on account of Labour’s win in the Hull North by-election. He had decided firmly on an early election before Hull voted.

Indeed, had Labour lost, the then government would in Wilson’s view have had to go to the country anyway, because its majority would have been down to one. His political secretary, Lady Falkender, has written that after Christmas 1965 Wilson had already decided that whatever happened the election would be in March 1966 and that this was the best and only possible time.Mr Major, unlike Wilson, has no choice, except to go before 1 May, which he will not do unless he has a brainstorm. If he does have one, it is an unresolved constitutional point whether the Cabinet can overrule him over asking the Queen for a dissolution. It is certainly one of the persistent errors of textbook writers that the dissolution of Parliament is never discussed in Cabinet.

On the contrary: it is often discussed, though the precise date is usually settled by a select group of Cabinet ministers and party apparatchiks. Conservative leaders since Lady Thatcher have shown a particular attachment to Chequers as a weekend venue for these discussions. I should have thought this was an abuse of the purposes for which the house in question was bequeathed to the nation. But let that pass.Though we may accept that the Cabinet can and does have a say in the timing of an election, can it prevent the prime minister from asking for a dissolution if enough ministers believe he has made a mistake? The question is not wholly theoretical It arose in the Maastricht debate in 1993.

Mr Major said that if he did not win a crucial vote, he would call a general election The Whips believed him. At any rate they told their charges that they did.His senior colleagues, however, demonstrated either scepticism or a belief that he had taken leave of his senses. They had no intention of allowing Mr Major to call a general election They would have called for a vote of confidence instead. In the event this proved unnecessary, for the Government won the necessary division by a vote. And if it had failed? “We wouldn’t have let him get half-way down the Mall,” one of the colleagues said.Something under four years later we are unlikely to witness similar excitements.

Ministers will just carry on, bickering away like an old married couple – though Lord Tebbit’s assault on Mr Michael Heseltine in this week’s Spectator is reminiscent not so much of bickering as of saucepan throwing. The excitement, if there is any, will come with the result of the election. From the Wirral there is not a crumb of comfort for the Government, though Dr David Carlton will no doubt try to extract one or two in next week’s Spectator. Like Dr Carlton, I believe more in counting people than in calculating swings. At the Wirral, the Labour vote was up from 17,407 to 22,767 and the Conservative vote down from 25,590 to 14,879. The turnout was down from 50,344 to 43,293, so if all the missing 7,051 voted Conservative at the election, it would still leave Labour with a narrow majority of 837.At the beginning I mentioned the possibility of a Labour landslide What do I mean by this? My definition is simple.