General Election Betting

General Election Betting / Andrew Hughes / 26 September 2007 / Leave a Comment

Election fever is a debilitating condition. It can turn the most eloquent of political journalists into trembling hacks, hallucinating about hustings, returning officers and swingometers.

And the most infectious place to be at the moment is the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, where every word of every speech is pored over minutely for any trace of a clue as to the likelihood of a 2007 election.

But who started all this? The mumblings that the new PM would want his own mandate remained fairly low key until the polls began to turn Labour's way in the late summer. In this febrile period of news famine, hacks began to give wider scope to their imagination than they would usually be allowed to get away with.

Then, rather than deny it the Brown team began to see the advantages in such speculation and started to play along, alternately dampening down or fanning the flames. The story now has a life of its own and there are suggestions that senior figures within the party are seriously considering an early election.

But Betfair punters beware - for all the column inches it has filled, I don't believe this speculation is leading anywhere. There are a number of reasons:

1 - Some commentators have mentioned Jim Callaghan's hesitation in the autumn of 1978, before the winter of discontent intervened and ushered in the dawn of Maggie. The comparison is a bogus one. The economic situations then and now are entirely different and whilst Callaghan was running out of time, Brown has another 2 ½ years to call an election.

I think the PM will have a more recent Labour disaster in mind. In 1992, opinion polls had Labour up by 7% with a week to go. The subsequent defeat deeply scarred him and many others in the party. Given his experiences then and his natural cautiousness, I can't believe that he has had his head turned by the sight of a single figure opinion poll lead.

2 - The weather. It is usually the case that those who want to bash an incumbent government show more determination to vote than those who are fairly satisfied with life and a November polling day could test the resolve of even the most hardened voter.

Throw in the prospect of not one but two livestock epidemics and the vision that presents itself is of freezing dark evenings, lit by the blaze from piles of burning cattle, not images designed to have people whistling Jerusalem and strolling to the polling booths.

3 - There are more strategic reasons too. In any election Brown will want to contrast his record with what will be characterised as Cameron's inexperience. But this attack loses much of its edge if Brown himself has only been doing the job for a matter of months. And the last thing they want is to spend the campaign explaining what he stands for. An autumn election would not give him time to develop health and education policies (a must for a Labour leader) or to build up a record as leader.

So why not rule it out now? Well what better way to keep his troops in line throughout his maiden conference as leader than to have them permanently on an election footing? Better yet, he can hold the threat of an election over the Conservative heads throughout their get together, because even he went for a 25th October election, he could announce it as late as the 7th.

An imminent election can concentrate the minds of MPs wonderfully and a party under pressure can do strange things. At the very least, Labour will hope to cause Cameron some discomfort during his week by the seaside.

So I would be a layer of a 2007 election at the current 3.55 price. I wouldn't be that interested in a Spring 2008 election either. The debate over the ratification of the EU treaty will be concluding around that time and there is the possibility of the Lords rejecting it.

With the Murdoch papers also likely to keep up their campaign for a referendum that could be a bad time to go to the country. There is also the Iraq issue. It would surely be a boost to Brown to be the man who brought the troops home, something that might take months rather than weeks to accomplish.

I think Jan-June 2009 is correctly the favourite - currently at 3.4 - but I also can't see why there is 19.0 available on July-Dec 2008 and would have a nibble at that too.