Politicians talking about a snap election on change of Prime Minister should take a leaf out of Mission Impossible

Creating an artificial intelligence to mimic modern politicians would be rather a challenge. Even if you got it right. Because if your AI prototype had shown some of the behaviour we’ve seen in the last few weeks, who’d have believed you had got it right?

But there’s one little algorithm that would be dead easy. It is ‘if there is a change of Prime Minister and your party is not in power, call for an early general election; otherwise rebuff calls for an early general election’.

It’s one of the less edifying aspects of politics to see politicians so eagerly banging the drum for a position that you can be 99% certain they would oppose if the roles were reversed. And all the more so in the case of those who were around in 2007 and did indeed say on Gordon Brown’s accession to 10 Downing Street the opposite of what they are saying now.

Which is why politicians insisting on supporting / opposing an early election should at least do so in the style of Mission Impossible: