As can be seen in the betting chart the market on who will be the next prime minister has moved around an enormous amount over the last couple of months. The big loser in betting terms has been Chancellor Sunak and this initially caused a fair bit of money to switch to Keir Starmer.

Then everything changed when it became clear that Johnson and Sonak were getting fined for their lockdown violations in 2020. This made Starmer much less attractive to punters because of the risk that the next PM could be a Tory. However this trend has now changed and Starmer is edging up a bit again.

But there are tricky hurdles ahead for the Prime Minister. On May 5th we have this year’s local elections and the signs are that the Tories could be in some trouble. But I am far from convinced that the CON MPs that remain at Westminster are ready to go through the process of trying to oust him.

My thinking remains that the next general election will see BorisJohnson still leading the Conservative party and Sir Keir Starmer still leading Labour.

Clearly at this stage it is very difficult to make a forecast on the outcome of that election but it is going to be much tougher for the Tories than last time. Then the blue team had an easy target with Corbyn. The former DPP is a different proposition.

Mike Smithson