Despite doubts about when it might happen, the prospect of a general election has many of the columnists in a fever of speculation.

The Guardian

Martin Kettle likens Boris Johnson to a football manager who has lost the first four matches of the season - and his job should be on the line, he says. “Most Tories backed Johnson because they thought he was a winner. This was always a foolish triumph of hope over reality.”

But despite Mr Johnson’s setbacks, a narrative has emerged that he will be vindicated at the polls with a weary pro-Brexit public ready to give him a mandate to press ahead. Could his unconvincing leadership be rescued by support from the terraces?

According to this theory about 35 per cent of the electorate want Brexit-at-all-costs. With the opposition divided, they will deliver Johnston a majority at an election. “Yet the evidence for this theory – on which everything else Johnson is doing - is very thin,” Kettle says.

The Tories are 29 seats down on the inadequate number they won at the last election. The Brexit Party could still cost them some seats. And, despite Jeremy Corbyn’s weak polling Labour cannot be written off, he suggests.

MrJohnson lacks both judgment and wisdom, he says: “This week most MPs decided they do not trust his advice, either. They were absolutely right. If and when an election finally comes, there is no good reason to suppose that the voters will react as differently as Johnson hopes.”

The Daily Express

Ross Clark says the Prime Minister is no longer in control of events and Britain currently has an unprecedented, informal, cross-party government.

But this loose alliance should beware, he says. “I fear for its own sake, that it may be drunk on the new-found sense of camaraderie among Tory rebels and opposition parties and fail to appreciate how out of tune it is with the country.”

Beyond a desire to block a no deal Brexit, its members have little common ground, he believes. They have no alternative to present because they can’t agree on one.

“The anti no-deal lobby has a fantasy that millions of Britons regret having voted Leave three years ago and are looking to their elected parliamentary representatives to reverse the result. But it isn’t true, as we would find out if we had a general election.”

This is the obvious way out, Clark claims, and he appeals to Labour MPs to defy their leader to trigger one.

The Financial Times

Scotland has been all but jettisoned in this, writes Philip Stephens. Ruth Davidson resigned citing family pressures. “It is no secret, however, that she loathed the pinched rightwing populism peddled by the prime minister. Her departure foreshadows a collapse of the Tory vote in Scotland.” The chances of an independence vote rise the longer Mr Johnson resides at Number 10, Stephens claims, as he makes a wider argument that we are witnessing the end of moderate broad-church One Nation Conservatism. “In his anxiety to outflank Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, Mr Johnson will fight an election as leader of the party of English nationalism.”

Reason has fled from the European argument, he declares, colourfully: “The message to Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron is simple: reewrite the agreement or we will blow ourselves up. Madness.” An election will settle little, he concludes: “More than likely an election will throw up another political deadlock.”

The Scotsman

With Westminster in turmoil and doubts over the political process itself, Joyce McMillan thinks we should all be asking ourselves some hard questions. “The 2016 EU referendum was poorly conducted and regulated, to the point of serious illegal conduct,” she states, while “the EU referendum was won for the Leave campaign at the moment when Dominic Cummings realised he could fill the Facebook news feeds of certain targeted voters with a crash diet of absolute lies about the EU , without breaking the law... until legislation catches up with that kind of practice, every citizen has reason to be worried.” The question, she says, is whether Britain is a nation of self-respecting citizens or “just a kingdom of self absorbed couch-potatoes, happy to be blagged into tolerating the latest self-harming scam dreamed up for them by their celebrity masters.”

How much do we care? “The most important test of all is the quiet self-interrogation taking place in millions of homes.”