In repealing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, I imagine Johnson will want a unilateral power to dissolve Parliament and call an election at will. If so, he'll pretend that was always the system before the FTPA. But that's not right. The Queen used to be the gatekeeper.

We need to go back to a system where someone independent performs a gatekeeping or watchdog role. Ideally it should be the Queen. If not, then it'll have to be Speaker or the courts. The point is to constrain the government from getting an election without good reason.

Written rules have proved useless. The FTPA has given the PM more power, and us more elections for worse reasons. The worst solution would be to hand formal power to the PM himself, or to a partisan Commons majority, or to exclude independent checks like the Queen and courts.