A big weekend for Westminster (and the UK)?

Rumblings are getting louder within the blogosphere of there being a very high possibility that Gordon Brown may choose this weekend to pluck up the courage to go to Buckingham Palace and call a General Election.  Guido Fawkes cites a BBC source in stating that BBC News and Politics teams have been put on "red alert" for an impending election call and have been told not to go away over the weekend.

Taking a neutral point of view for a moment, this would look to be the best course of action for the Government for a couple of reasons:

The Budget
Alistair Darling's Pre-Budget Report back in late 2009 posed an awful lot of questions for the politically-inclined.  He made an awful lot of offers to the electorate whilst being very quiet on how all these extra provisions would be paid for.

Given the amount of column inches, and time at PMQs that has been devoted to the issue of "The Deficit", it is highly likely that whoever forms the next Government will have to tighten the nation's collective belt considerably.  With this in mind, both Labour and the Conservatives should know that they will have to make some unpopular decisions when it comes to the next budget.

If Brown goes to The Palace this weekend and announces a shortest-possible campaign of three weeks, it would mean a General Election on Thursday 25th March; comfortably within the twelve-month lifespan of the 2009 Budget, meaning that the first that the electorate would hear about how they would pay for all these Labour promises would be after giving them a mandate for a further five years.

A Lucky Escape
As mentioned in a previous post, Brown can count himself extremely lucky to have weathered the storm of the bullying accusations and to have actually come out of it better than he went in.  Given this miraculous outcome for him and his Party, he may seek to capitalise on his new-found "strongman" image by calling an election as soon as possible.

The Opinion Polls
With the Conservative lead down to just five points - which if duplicated in the real polls would rob the Tories of victory - Brown may see this as now-or-never time.  I am sure that if you had offered Brown a five-point Conservative lead just twelve months ago, he would have called an election there and then.  Will Brown have the balls to do it this time?

Update: 1634hrs GMT - Ladbrokes suspend betting on a March General Election...