Boris Johnson Tries His Hand at General Election Betting

2 Mar 2010

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson is partial to a bit of betting and one of his favourite forms of gambling is betting on politics.

Boris Jonson does not care for opinion polls when it comes to prediction the outcome of a general election. The bookies, he thinks, provide a much better guide to the future winners and, out of all the bookmakers, he says that Betfair is by far the best at indicating who will form the next government.

He said that in his experience the accuracy of Betfair had been uncanny. The reason, he said, was that where people betted money, there thoughts were better concentrated. After all, it costs nothing to tell a pollster anything that comes into your head.

So if he is correct, then what, given the rapidly fluctuating opinion polls of recent days, is really going to happen?

If Boris is right, then there is little doubt that the Tories are going to walk it as they are a massive favourite at Betfair with the odds on them gaining the most seats being 9/50; Labour is priced at 23/5. In fact those aren’t even the best odds available on the Tories, several other bookmakers are offering 1/7 on the Tories and 4/1 on Labour.

Certainly Boris will be backing the Tories, in fact he has already bet £1,000 that they will get a majority. He finds the thought that Labour might win another term to be laughable. Gamblers, he said, had considered their options closely and had put themselves in the place of the millions of sensible people who will vote in a few months time.

In fact if you look at the history of Betfair predictions then it becomes apparent that what Boris is saying is correct and not only on the English political scene. In the last US election they got it right in 48 States out of 40.