What I am carrying forward into 2009

At midnight tonight, assuming nothing untoward happens to Gord, I pick up on quite a hefty bet that I placed in the early summer at 5/6 that Brown would still be Prime Minister at the end of the year. And if by any remote chance he doesn’t there are a another couple of bets I placed at 6/1 and 5/1 at a different time that he would be out by the end of 2008. The amounts staked and the odds are such that whatever happens there’s a profit.

For one of the characteristics of political betting is that often your wagers are fairly long-term. What you have to do is judge the percentage chance of the outcome happening and decide whether the odds being offered represent good value. You can, like with the Brown survival bet, be on both sides of the outcome. When you see a good bet act quickly because others are also on the look out and bookies can change their prices very fast.

I move into 2009 with a series of other long-term wagers including:-

There are a range of other bets as well but, surprising for me, I’ve nothing on the general election spread markets at the moment. I don’t see any value either way.

Have a profitable 2009!

A special appeal to PB’s “Lurkers”: Your votes in the election for PB Poster of 2008 are especially welcome. Most of the voting until now has come from regular posters themselves. Please spare a couple of minutes to give us your view as well. Voting ends at midnight.

Is the William Hill 7/4 on it being Gord a value bet?

Thanks to Noisy Summer on the the previous thread for picking this up but William Hill has just launched a new online market on which of the three party leaders – Brown. Clegg or Cameron – will leave their post first.

The bookie makes Clegg the 11/10 favourite with Brown at 7/4 and Cameron at 5/2. I think that they have got this wrong and that the Brown odds offer the value.

Nick Clegg. After a tentative start Clegg is now seen within the party to be doing a lot better and his stances of civil liberties issues are resonating. He performed very well over Greengate – an issue that’s likely to erupt again in the next few weeks if the case is dropped.

After going through two leadership contests within such a short time there is simply no stomach in the party for a new contest and it would take a massive explosion for something to force Clegg out. Yes some polls have been poor for the party but their ICM figures have been pretty stable and that pollster has by far the best long-term record of getting the third party share right. Even if there are general election set-backs I think he will remain in the post for the foreseeable future.

David Cameron: I can’t see any circumstances in which the Tories would change horses this side of the election. It’s just too close and Cameron has shown that he’s resilient when things have been down. Clearly a below expectation general election outcome would make him vulnerable but unless Labour is returned with workable majority then he appears secure.

Gordon Brown: He’s had a renaissance in the past ten weeks but if things turn badly wrong again then his leadership, surely, could become an issue again. If this does happen then it’s going to hit his confidence very hard. My sense for some time is that if Brown thought he was heading for certain defeat in the general election then he might step aside on health grounds.

So 7/4 on it being Brown seems like a value bet and is where my money has gone.

Can Labour expect a drubbing on June 5th?

Cast your mind back to the last Euro Elections which were held on the same day as the local elections on June 10th 2004. In the weeks beforehand the Tories had suffered serious opinion poll reverses as UKIP’s strength started to emerge and all the predictions were that the Tory leader of just eight months, Michael Howard, was going to fail at his first major electoral test.

Yet when it came to real votes the outcome was terrible for Labour as can be seen in the panel above. The GB vote share of 22.6% that Blair’s Labour secured was unprecedented for a governing party in a national election. The Tories had “won” by a sizeable margin.

If that’s what happened to Labour in the relatively benign environment of four and a half years ago what can Brown’s party expect on June 5th 2009? However you read it the Tories are doing much better than then and could be set up nicely if the general election is not on the same day or has been held beforehand.

Gordon Brown, surely, does not want to go into the final period before the general election with his party seen as a big time loser?

But that’s not all. It’s not just the Euro Election where Labour could suffer on June 5th – there are the local elections planned for that day as well.

And here’s the rub – the vast bulk of these will take place in wards and divisions that were last fought on May 5th 2005 – the day of the last general election which inevitably led to local turnouts being way above what happens when they are held on their own.

And turnouts in the 30s rather than the 60% average of 2005 will add further to Labour’s toll. For the overwhelming challenge Brown’s party faces is getting its vote out in elections when the government of the country is not at stake.

So a June 5th 2009 general election or one just beforehand solves a lot of problems for the PM who in the spring will, no doubt, be boosted by the G20 meeting which has been scheduled for London for April. As host there should be plenty of photo opportunities for him and Barack Obama.

In spite of all of this I am far from convinced that he will do it. The polls are not going to return to what they were in September 2007 and for any prime minister general election timing is a massive decision where deferral is often the easiest option.

Gordon will be very aware that Harold Wilson probably got it wrong by going too early in 1970; Edward Heath should have gone earlier in February 1974 but dithered and then lost and, Labour lost power in 1979 when Jim Callaghan might have clung on if he had gone in October 1978.

General election betting markets.

Have the interest rate cuts been behind the Brown bounce?

Starting with the usual caveat about not reading too much into poll subsets there is some quite interesting data from the latest Ipsos-MORI poll linking the tenure of respondents to their voting intention.

From what I can see the firm only started providing this information in November so there is almost nothing we can compare current figures with. But what we see in the panel above is an enormous split between those with mortgages or who pay rent and those who own their own properties outright.

Thus if the voting was just restricted to the owning outright then it would be C53-L33-LD10 enough to give Cameron a massive landslide. Whereas amongst those still paying off their mortgage who have benefited enormously from the interest rate cuts the split C33-L39-LD15 which would produce a three figure majority for Brown.

Clearly the owner outright group has many more older people in it and they generally tend to be more pro-Tory.

One thing that makes the owners without mortgage so much more powerful is that they are disproportionally more likely to vote. Their certainty percentage is 68% compared with 47% for the mortgage payers and just 32% for private renters.

This data will be worth tracking.