Rishi Sunak is – not unusually – playing it safe by saying his ‘working assumption’ is that the election will be in the second half of this year. The speculation that it would be on 2 May had been building to the point that the Prime Minister was at risk of looking afraid if he didn’t then go for a spring poll. He knows from watching what happened to Gordon Brown’s Election That Never Was the dangers of ramping up speculation without following through. That doesn’t mean he won’t change course and go for the May election in the end anyway, but dampening the chatter about it is a sensible tactic.

One of the reasons many Conservatives assumed there would be an election on 2 May is that the local elections are also due to be held on this day, which means councillors will be out knocking on doors to save their own bacon as well as that of the MP. As I explained in the Observer recently, an autumn election does mean that the Tory activist base may be demoralised after heavy local losses, and therefore new candidates replacing the hordes of Conservative MPs heading for the door will have even less support.

But in recent days, an interesting theory had developed among some backbenchers and junior ministers. They think the local elections, due to take place on 2 May, could instead be shuffled back to June to take place at the same time as a general election. This would be in the first half of the year – just – and would mean the party could still harness local councillors to their maximum effect. It’s not clear, though, what the point of the extra month would be. By the autumn, there could be more green shoots for Sunak to point at and say ‘stick with me so I can finish the job’.

Labour’s response has been to borrow from the way the Tories treated Gordon Brown in 2010: they are calling Sunak a ‘squatter’ who is afraid of a general election. Together with the Liberal Democrats, they will continue to push for polling day to come as soon as possible, with Ed Davey threatening to table a return of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act so that MPs can set the election for 2 May after all. Sunak’s majority is pretty hollow on most things, but he can be confident that Davey’s plan is as much of a stunt as his removal van yesterday: no Tory MP is going to vote for their party to lose an election sooner rather than later.