Political Betting is a new weekly column by Mark Littlewood aimed at people who like gambling on politics.
The accepted wisdom is that politics today is more febrile, chaotic and unpredictable than at any point in our lifetimes. Certainly, movements in electoral behaviour that may once have been observed as glacial trends now seem to happen in the blink of an eye.
For generations it was assumed that if a party won a landslide election victory, it was more or less guaranteed two terms in office. Yet in the five years from 2019, the Tories went from an impregnable 80-seat majority to their worst electoral performance in the history of democracy. Labour, in contrast, went from its most pitiful showing since the Second World War to securing a dominance in the House of Commons greater even than that achieved by Thatcher in the 1980s.
If we are living in an era of electoral entropy, aren’t predictions almost as random as picking your lottery numbers?
If after Corbyn’s miserable defeat in 2019 you’d deduced that a Labour landslide of over 150 at the next election was worth a punt, you’d have been offered spectacular odds. Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s 2024 landslide, if you’d had a flutter on Starmer being out of Downing Street by the end of 2026 you’d be sitting very pretty just about now.
But could such apparently prescient forecasts have ever been anything much more than total flukes? Was there anything at all in
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If you asked me to chose as to who is going to go first from Starmer or Southampton FC my money is on the Saints being awarded a 3-0 defeat at Middlesbrough for their spying.
I wonder how many knighthoods and other ho ours will be issued this year. Especially to the SDLT investigations unit.
how many previously fined tax payers will now mount a class action for restitution following Rayner’s miraculous avoidance of a penalty.
If Labour stays in power, whichever goul/goon runs it, we all lose!
Oddly enough, just a couple of days ago I had a converstion with a friend who bets on politics (I don’t bet on anything) about the likelihood of there being a general election before Christmas. Unlikely? Very unlikely. Impossible? No, given that 10 year gilt yields are now above 5%. It would surely be very different to 1976 were there to be a debt crisis. The then C of E, Denis Healey, was an adult. So were most of the Labour backbenchers. The current mob are student politicians, who probably couldn’t be trained to walk through the ‘prudent’ lobby.
Al Carns, having failed to support veterans being pursued through the courts by Hermer & Starmer, has done himself no favours. This will be his Achilles heel.