Great news! Bookies think Labour can win the next election. Bad news! It’s down to Elon Musk |
It’s just one bookie and it’s just one February day in the week of a chaotic byelection, but it’s happened: for the first time in 18 months, Star Sports has staked Labour as most likely to win the general election. “Keir Starmer’s party have been in the ascendency in the market,” said their head of betting, William Kedjanyi, “shortening into 13/8 from 15/8 in the past week to supplant Reform at the head of the betting.” Meanwhile, Reform UK has gone the other way as the party’s odds have drifted from 13/8 to 15/8. Normally, I would query how meaningful that was; how do you tell the difference, in a political gambling market definitionally run on hot air, between rising fortunes and last-ditch flailing? But Kedjanyi, outside a conference fringe meeting some years ago, successfully explained to me how odds worked, when I’d already been pretending to understand them for decades. So at the very least, I know he’s right about one thing: if you’d score 13 quid off an £8 stake at Starmer’s victory, and £15 from the same at Nigel Farage’s, then things are less bleak for Labour than they seem.
In no particular order, here are the reasons to be cheerful, but not giddy: Star Sports attributes this as Reform’s loss rather than Labour’s win, pointing to the challenger party Restore Britain, founded by the Elon Musk-backed MP Rupert Lowe, as the real source of Farage’s problems. The fringe organisation’s policies........