Gordon Brown Betfair Update

March 3, 2007 at 4:28 pm · Filed under betfair, odds, leadership election

It has been a few months since the last time we checked on Gordon’s prospects in the Betfair markets, so lets see how he’s doing now. Then we will gauge reaction to his Budget speech in a few weeks time by checking on the odds again afterwards.
In the “Next Labour Leader” market, we can see that Gordon’s odds are now 1.29, significantly shorter than September’s odds of 1.45. Things are starting to shake out in the leadership race, and it is also a lot clearer now that Blair is likely to stand down soon, so Brown has less time to make any “cock ups” and therefore a better chance of winning. There are, however, two more interesting things to note in the market. Firstly the odds of Brown’s nearest challenger David Milliband have come in significantly to only 11.0. Betfair are good enough to provide charts of how the odds have changed over time and these are displayed below:

So a serious challenger has emerged in Milliband, albeit still an outsider, but from the charts you can see by looking from left to right how much the odds of Milliband have shortened in the past few months. Contrast this with Brown’s odds shown below, which now appear to be creeping back up again. A further look at these charts after the budget speech will show just how well or badly Gordon is shaping up.

The second, and perhaps more important, market to monitor is the “Next General Election - Most Seats” market. This shows how well Brown is doing against Cameron, and it does not make for good news for Gordon. When we last checked in September, the odds on Labour vs. the Conservatives were 2.22 to 1.83. This has now shifted even more in favour of Cameron, and now stands at 2.28 to 1.77. Combine this with the poll results, and things are not looking too good for Gordon.

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