Brown and Cameron; photo credit: Shane McMurray

The once broadly held view that Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, would call a General Election at the latest possible moment has in recent days been called into doubt.

Speculation has been mounting in recent days that Brown may call a snap election in March 2010 rather than waiting until May, especially after Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, told Sunday Live on Sky News that he has told his team “to be ready in the new year for an early election.”

General Elections in the United Kingdom are called at the discretion of the incumbent Prime Minister but must take place before the start of each new five-year Parliamentary term, and therefore before May 2010 in this instance.

Rumours of an early election were further fuelled by recent polls indicating that Labour is catching up with their Conservative rivals. The Conservatives still lead the polls  “but the gap has declined by four points in a month,” stated an editorial in The Guardian, “which is a lot in this business, and the nine-point Tory lead is the first [in this series of polls] to be in single figures during the whole of this year.”

In addition, some have perceived the Prime Minster’s recent overnight visit to the Afghanistan war zone – the first such visit by any British Prime Minister since Winston Churchill – as another indication that Mr. Brown was preparing for an early election. “Mr Brown looked thrilled,” wrote Ann Treneman in The Times “History was calling. He had an answer . . . It’s amazing what a night in a double bed in a war zone does for you. The man seems to be on some kind of statesman high.”

Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling’s one-off tax on bankers’ bonuses above £25,000, described in The Financial Times as “popular with the public,” may also be interpreted as having been conceived with the same early election motive in mind.

However, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Families and Schools and a close ally of the Prime Minister, moved to counter any  snap election rumours. Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Balls said “I have heard no talk about going for a snap or early election.”