Is it Time to Bet on a General Election This Year?

Political Betting is a weekly column by Mark Littlewood aimed at people who like gambling on politics.

Barring some extraordinary happenstance, Andy Burnham will be confirmed as the new Labour leader and the next Prime Minister by the middle of next month. That’s the easy part to predict. Determining what might then unfold between then and the end of the year requires one to layer endless speculation on top of wild guesswork. Nevertheless, getting that right is what a successful betting strategy is based on.

I’m now persuaded that the chances of a general election before the end of the year, whilst fairly slim, are considerably better than the betting odds suggest. You can find 8/1 with a plethora of bookmakers and as long as 9/1 on the betting exchanges. This is likely a losing bet, but the odds are so attractive it is well worth a punt.

The first issue is the extent to which there will be a meaningful – and sustained – bounce for Labour in the polls. As I write there is scant data. The two most recent opinion polls show Labour dropping a percentage point (down to 21% with MoreInCommon and as low as 18% with YouGov). However, much of the fieldwork was conducted prior to official confirmation of Keir Starmer’s resignation and certainly before it became evident that Burnham was set to win the leadership of his party without serious challenge. If Labour stay stuck at these sorts of numbers – or anywhere close to them – you can obviously rule out any chance of Andy Burnham going to the country.

But how big a bounce would we need to see over the summer for the new PM to ponder whether he should make a dash to the polls? My best guess would be that consistent Labour leads of around 5% over Reform would incline Andy Burnham to seriously consider an election in October. That would imply Labour climbing from around 20% to somewhere in the region of 30% or above. That amounts to quite a leap and a cynic might say that Burnham’s rather vague message of sunshine and hope is unlikely to supercharge his party’s support by anything like that amount.

However, he may be blessed by his opponents finding themselves in a mixture of difficulties. Electoral politics is a zero-sum game and you can find yourselves doing better simply because others start doing worse.

Nigel Farage is currently beset by questions relating to a £5 million gift he received before finally deciding to re-enter frontline politics in the 2024 election. This is one of those stories that is an obsession of the Westminster media and of very limited interest to the wider electorate. Nevertheless, it is a distraction and chews up Farage’s bandwidth. Every minute spent explaining his personal finances to the media is one fewer minute deployed in trying to ensure Reform looks like a plausible alternative government. Reform is also having to face the fact that Rupert Lowe’s Restore are taking a measurable nibble out of its vote.

The Greens seem to have hit a much more significant buffer. The more the public hear about Zack Polanski, the more of a charlatan he seems. Whether it’s his previous career as a hypnotist with breast-enlarging powers, his failure to pay council tax or apparently not even voting for the Greens’ mayoral candidate in Hackney when he had said on camera that he had done so, Britain’s newest political insurgent is now coming across as more of a prankster than a pretender to the throne. Some of the saner Greens seem very warm towards the Prime Minister designate, with former leader Caroline Lucas going so far as to argue that they should not even have fielded a candidate in Makerfield.

The Lib Dems continue to amble along apparently not much minding that they occupy no meaningful place in the new political landscape. Insofar as their members and voters still care about securing a change in the electoral system, they may find the carrot being dangled by Burnham on this issue more enticing than continuing to support Ed Davey’s flatlining party.

All of that is to say that while any Burnham bounce might be modest in its own terms, the overall uplift in Labour’s polling position over the next couple of months could be rather larger. I don’t think it likely that they will rise into the low thirties, but I do put such an outcome within the category of “definitely possible”.

Let’s imagine – albeit against the odds – that Burnham does find himself in such a position come September. I think there would be three good reasons to go to the country.

First, it would give him the ability to pivot dramatically away from the 2024 manifesto. It is not at all unusual for a Prime Minister to come to office without a general election (Burnham will be the sixth of our last eight prime ministers to have done so). However, it is rather harder to plough your own furrow if you achieve the highest office in this fashion. The electorate already seem to want an early election. My rough guess would be that if Burnham felt confident of winning with a majority of 40 or 50, he’d pull the trigger. This would represent a measurable decrease in Labour representation in the Commons, but he would have his own mandate rather than being parasitic on Starmer’s.

Second, from what one can judge by going through the intellectually challenging process of trying to interpret what the vagaries emitted by Burnham mean in concrete terms, it does seem that he wishes to part dramatically with the Starmer plan. Burnham’s broad position isn’t that Labour has necessarily done a poor job of implementing the 2024 manifesto but rather that it should be trying to implement something rather different. He won’t have the real authority to do so based merely on receiving 25,000 votes in a single parliamentary constituency and becoming Labour leader without a contest.

Third, if the polls were to tilt in Burnham’s favour and he still didn’t decide to call an election, he would face accusations of cowardice. This would hardly be a mortal blow but it eats away at credibility. Gordon Brown must still have sleepless nights about his decision to duck an election when he could have won, then seeing out his term before falling to what was, by then, an inevitable defeat. Burnham may also be scarred somewhat by that miscalculation back in 2007.

I don’t expect the stars to align in exactly the way I’ve suggested. But there’s a fair chance they could. The 8/1 or 9/1 on an election before the end of the year is too good a bet to miss.

Mark Littlewood is a former director of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Director of PopCon.