Next General Election Odds: Conservatives in freefall in the Betting Markets

We are now a fortnight into this General Election campaign and it would probably be fair to say that things aren’t going exactly as Rishi Sunak may have planned.

Neil Monnery takes us through the latest General Election Odds over on Betfred.com, with this column focusing on the Conservative markets…

Ever since the Prime Minister came out onto Downing Street, in the rain, with D-Ream’s, ‘Things can only get better,’ blasting out from the road outside, the campaign has only gone downhill for the man who made the surprising call to head to the polls on July 4.

Firstly, not seeing off Reform UK has to be seen as a massive own-goal. Back in 2019, the Brexit Party were going to field candidates in every constituency and knew by doing so that it would seriously harm the Conservative vote.

After some brinkmanship, Nigel Farage stood down his candidates in Tory held seats to ensure that they didn’t split the Pro-Brexit vote and allow the Lib Dems in across vast swathes of Remain-leaning areas.

All Rishi Sunak had to do was not openly antagonise them and in all likelihood, Farage stays out of this campaign and doesn’t turbocharge the party. Instead, he went on the record that there would be no pacts and after some deliberation, Nigel Farage stepped back into the political arena and it was evident, they weren’t going to back down.

Following that issue, he had the opportunity to look Statesmanlike at a key event such as the D-Day Memorial. It is one of those occasions where you have to go a long way to not look like the leader of a country, yet Sunak high-tailed it back to London quick-sharpish following the ceremony for an interview with ITV News rather than stay with the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden for photographs and the like. This is just being a plain bad politician and the fact none of his team stepped in to stop this mistake is a terrible indictment on them all.

Yesterday the Prime Minister did an interview where from what I can gather, his key point he wanted to put across was that his parents went without Sky TV so that they could pay his sky-high private school fees. I don’t think that makes him a man of the people and if his family could afford such an expensive education for him, I’m fairly sure they could have rustled up the £40-50 per month that satellite TV cost back then. There is no planet where the electorate will ever see him in that light, so I have no idea why he keeps trying to go down that path.

We saw a poll earlier this week that had Reform UK just a point behind the Tories and the Lib Dems just another two further back. Running those numbers would actually give Sir Ed Davey’s party a real chance of being the official opposition. I have no idea how we got here but could this actually be a realistic outcome?

The odds say yes, yes it is. The Lib Dems were 9/1 (10%) in the ‘To win most seats with Labour’ market on Betfred when this election was called. As of this morning, you would get just 100/30 (23% chance) for the same bet over on Betfred. This is honestly just staggering and shows just how poor of a campaign it has been so far for the party of government.

A fortnight ago, Betfred set the over/under line for total Tory seats at 161 but this morning it is sitting at just 99. This epitomises the mood of the country and seeing the Conservatives being attacked on all flanks has led to the very real possibility of dipping below 100 MPs in the next parliament.

There are still three weeks to go but Rishi Sunak will have to do a lot to turn around this sinking ship. I would still take the over at 99 MPs and think the notion that the Lib Dems could be the official opposition is fanciful but the fact it is now worthy of genuine consideration says plenty about how this campaign is going for the Conservative party.

We’ll cover this ongoing story from now through to General Election day itself from our team here at Betfred Insights. Keep checking out our coverage from the Next Prime Minister markets through to key individual constituencies over the coming weeks as we follow the twists and turns from a betting perspective for the 2024 General Election in our Politics Betting Tips section.