Boston & Skegness Odds: Reform UK are a Value Bet for upset win

As we continue our ongoing series of looking at constituencies up and down the country, we head over to Lincolnshire, where Reform UK are making their big stand. Can their leader Richard Tice win a seat in the House of Commons?

Let’s take a look at the latest Boston & Skegness Odds to see what the betting markets indicate…

More column inches than it deserves will be penned about whether Richard Tice is going to win the Boston & Skegness constituency in the 2024 General Election but whether they win a seat or are just a nuisance for the Conservative Party, there is no doubt that the performance of Reform UK candidates up and down the land will have a considerable say on the make-up of the next parliament.

We’ll take a step back from the big picture though and focus on this constituency. It was first contested in 1997 where the Labour Party were just 647 votes short of taking it. Even four years later they were keeping things close, just 515 away that time but since those two elections, the seat has become solidly blue to the point where last time out, the Boris Johnson-led Conservative Party romped home with a 25,621 majority and just under 77% of the vote. This on paper shouldn’t even be a seat that gets anything other than a cursory glance but there is a reason people are keeping a close eye on it.

This was the constituency with the largest Brexit vote in the country, with more than three-quarters of all those who went to the polls in the 2016 EU Referendum choosing to cast their ballot to leave the European Union. At UKIP’s height back in 2015, they finished a very strong second in this seat, coming just 4,336 votes shy of toppling the Tories. So there is a history here of voting for the most right-wing candidate and with the area having been home to a large migrant population, there is plenty of angst around that Reform UK can tap into.

It would take a perfect storm for Richard Tice to be victorious but the ingredients are certainly there for this to come about. The Tories are extremely unpopular and despite all the tough-talk coming out of the mouth of the Prime Minister, there are still no Rwanda Flights in the air and the small boats are still arriving on our shores, both of these are bound to be brought up time and time again in such a constituency.

The latest national polling has Reform UK (14%) just eight points behind the Conservative Party (22%). That is not a large gap at all and with Rishi Sunak’s stumbling so far in this campaign, it would be wildly optimistic to believe that his numbers are about to get any sort of significant bounce.

Seeing the Tories rated as a 77% chance to win the seat, which the odds of 3/10 suggest, feels on the optimistic side. Both Labour and Reform UK are sitting at 5/1 (17%) as of the time of writing and those 5/1 odds for Richard Tice feel like a bet worth taking. I’m not sure he can overcome that stonking majority but he certainly has a better chance than the odds indicate. 3/1 would be rated as a 25% possibility of winning and that would be more in line with what I’d be thinking at this stage.

The Lib Dems and Greens are both 200/1 shots but that is just not going to happen. You can check out all of the live Boston & Skegness Odds behind the link on betfred.com

No-one is really going into this General Election believing that they are voting for the next Prime Minister or the next government. A Conservative victory with Rishi Sunak remaining in Number Ten would be one of the most staggering results a western democracy has ever seen. This means the electorate are far more likely to vote for who they want or send a message to a political party. With the Tories drifting ever further right (but not right enough for many) and them alienating their soft Conservative vote, their potential electorate seems to be narrowing.

Straight up I’m taking the Tories to win here as that majority is just so immense but at the current odds, the value is strongly in believing Reform UK can win this particular seat and gather an important foothold in the corridors of power. I fully expect their odds to come in over the coming days.

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.