Will Burnham Go Early?

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

The likely timing of the next election is dividing opinion and the betting markets now show a decisive (and about even) split between those with a suspicion that Burnham may go early and those who suspect he will see out the full Parliamentary term.

If you feel the Prime Minister might pull the trigger at any moment, you can secure odds of nearly 20/1 that he goes to the country before the end of the year. An election in 2027 is a shade over 2/1 on the exchanges, where you can also get nearly 5/1 on a 2028 poll. The chances that Labour will see out its full term are available at a tad better than evens (for those of a conspiracy theory mindset, the odds tend to be listed as “2029 or later”!)

There are three factors in play which will determine whether Andy Burnham seeks a fresh mandate before he has to and these factors are intertwined.

The first theory is that a comfortable win in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on October 8th could encourage the PM to chance his arm. A Labour victory is a general 1/3 with Zack Polanski, the Green leader, at 3/1 against. What is already a complicated picture is made still messier with the news that George Galloway has decided to throw his black fedora into the ring. To my mind, his intervention is more likely to harm the Greens than Labour by splitting the Muslim protest vote (about 20% of the constituency electorate is Muslim).

Barring a landslide victory for Labour with a dramatically increased vote share (Keir Starmer polled just short of 50% last time), attempting to read across from this by-election to a nationwide poll would be a fool’s errand. It will tell us very little about the strength of the parties on the Right, none of whom will be on anything approaching fertile ground. Similarly, the picture on the Left will be hard to extrapolate as it will be difficult to disentangle the Green total from any ‘Polanski’ effect and to work out what the meaning is, if anything, of Galloway’s vote share.

If Labour does somehow poll north of 60% of the vote, chatter about an early election will increase. But Burnham would be brave to the point of reckless to be confident of securing a national victory based on a highly idiosyncratic local result.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Holborn is wholly irrelevant to the consideration of the timing of a General Election. A blowout win for Labour would clearly tip the scales a little. But anything short of such a result keeps the prospect of an election in the next six or eight months firmly on ice.

The second consideration is the current state of Reform. Those of an anti-Farage bent have been salivating in the last couple of weeks about an impending implosion of his party. Sadly, for them, this seems to be a classic case of the wish being the father of the thought. For all of the furore around the recent Channel 4 ‘sting’, Reform’s polling seems remarkably robust. For sure, it has fallen off its peak of around 30% of a year ago, but there is now some evidence that somewhere between 22% and 23% might be their floor. Even those who delight in seeing a fall-off in Farage’s personal ratings may be looking at the wrong metrics. I suspect that a tranche of people who didn’t like Nigel Farage very much have now moved into the territory of saying that they don’t like him at all – but this cohort were unlikely Reform voters from the outset. Reform still faces the conundrum of where it thinks it might get an additional 5% or 10% of the vote from (which is roughly what it needs to seriously aspire to form a majority government); but there is no evidence it is in a downwards spiral.

The news over the weekend that Reform’s coffers are to be swelled to the tune of £72 million is also just the shot in the arm that Farage was hoping for. These mega donations from two billionaires will not just level the playing field but will allow Reform to outgun its opponents in terms of direct campaigning activity. There are two other benefits as well.

First, although Reform’s membership has surpassed 250,000 it has had to start to build an infrastructure around these activists from scratch. The Delo and Harborne gifts will allow the party to supercharge this process. The gaps in Reform’s ground game – especially a lack of historical voting intention data to enable effective targeting – can be plugged extremely rapidly.

Second, the sheer quantum of these recent donations will allow Reform to adopt an extremely cautious approach to accepting any other funds that might be anywhere ‘near the line’. Why risk any reputational damage at all around who funds some opinion poll work for a few tens of thousands, if you have already secured tens of millions in support?

One might argue that Burnham fears that Reform’s financial muscle might improve still further in the coming months, so maybe there’s a case to cut and run before Nigel Farage has had the chance to work out exactly how to spend this new influx of cash or gets the benefits of investing it in party infrastructure. But that would be to misread the situation. To justify the risk of going to the country early, Labour would want to see Reform genuinely imploding; despite the travails of recent weeks, that simply isn’t happening.

The third factor – and the only one that really counts – is the state of the opinion polls. These are obviously impacted by unfolding political events such as funding stories and by-election outcomes. But they are affected by such ‘small ball’ political stories much less than many pundits like to believe. Unless Labour opens a consistent lead of between 6% and 8% in the polls, going to the country would be an enormous risk. Theresa May’s decision to call an early election in 2017 backfired spectacularly, but at least she had the excuse that her poll lead was enormous (before it evaporated in the course of the campaign). Had she been sitting on a Commons majority in excess of 150, she surely would never have fired the starting pistol.

The smart bet remains on this Parliament going long. You can double your money by placing such a wager. The only downside is that you will have to wait until 2029 to bank your winnings.

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