Boris Johnson Faces Parliament Defeat on Snap Election: Trader’s Guide
Boris Johnson Faces Parliament Defeat on Snap Election: Trader’s Guide
(Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Boris Johnson will suspend Britain’s Parliament on Monday night for five weeks. Before that, his opponents are hoping to inflict two more defeats on him.
This is what’s coming, on a day that saw the pound rally to the highest level against the dollar since July, before paring gains after House of Commons Speaker John Bercow announced he was stepping down.
Before 7.15 p.m.: Document Release
An emergency debate aimed at forcing the government to release details on
- its no-deal Brexit planning
- discussions that took place ahead of the decision to suspend parliament for so long
Since Johnson expelled 21 Conservative members of parliament, he’s a long way short of having a majority, and he’s likely to lose.
Before midnight: Snap General Election
In the final debate of the evening, Johnson will make a second attempt to get Parliament to vote for a snap general election. He needs two-thirds of MPs -- 434 of them -- to vote for this. Last week he got 298, and there’s no reason to think he’ll get any closer this week.
The pound may get a limited boost if the attempt gets voted down, according to Brendan McKenna, a currency strategist at Wells Fargo Securities in New York. That result would probably increase the probability of avoiding a no-deal Brexit, given the bill that was just passed, he said.
Johnson could make a statement after the second vote. When that business has finished, Parliament will be “prorogued,” in a ceremony involving a statement from Queen Elizabeth II being read in the upper House of Lords. Parliament will be suspended.
If all goes as expected, on the six votes that Johnson has tried to win in Parliament since becoming prime minister, he will have been defeated every time.
--With assistance from Susanne Barton.
To contact the reporters on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net;Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-Jackson
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