The House returns today after the Bank Holiday weekend, and Ed Davey is ready for it with a no confidence motion. If it passes it will force a General Election next month.

The actual wording is: “That this House has no confidence in His Majesty’s Government.”

Ed says:

These local elections showed the country has had enough of Rishi Sunak and his out-of-touch Conservative Government.

The Conservatives were pushed into third place for the first time in a generation as Liberal Democrats swept the board in former true blue heartlands.

Yet Sunak continues to desperately cling on to power, holed up in Downing Street until the bitter end.

Conservative MPs need to wake up and smell the coffee, and back giving the country the election it so desperately wants and needs. The longer this appalling government stumbles on, the worse it is for the NHS, people’s living standards and our environment.

So what are the chances of the motion passing? The last time a Government lost a no confidence vote was in 1979, when Jim Callaghan was Labour Prime Minister. It was brought by the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, who formed the subsequent Government. It is worth noting that Callaghan was leading a minority Government, and he lost the motion by one vote. It is very rare for a vote of no confidence to succeed when a party has a solid majority.

Since then there have been 9 unsuccessful motions of no confidence, all targeted at Conservative Governments. One of these was brought in the House of Lords.

The convention is that a motion of no confidence takes precedence over anything else timetabled for the day. Today’s will give opposition parties an opportunity to note the Conservatives’ very poor performance in last week’s local elections and to raise the demand for an early General Election.

I’m fascinated by the subtly different ways in which the press has headlined this move. On the one hand Reuters has a neutral take on it with “UK’s Lib Dems to submit motion of no-confidence in Rishi Sunak’s government“.  On the other hand GB News predictably has “Lib Dems to table no-confidence motion in desperate bid to force June general election” and Sky News briefly had “Lib Dems plot confidence vote in bid to force June election”. Maybe desperate plots are what this country needs at the moment….

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.