Start collecting your winnings on Blair’s 2005 election victory

In a remarkable move this afternoon the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power have announced that the election is over and will pay out from today on all bets on Labour placed before Thursday 28th April.

They say they are doing this because of “Labour’s increasing lead in the opinion polls” and hardly anybody is betting on anything other than a Labour victory in this market. The price on Tony Blair’s party has moved from 1/14 at the start of the campaign to the final 1/25 before the bookmaker declared that, for them at least, this bet has been resolved even though there is a further week of campaigning to go.

If by any chance that the Tories manage to win then Paddy says that they will honour the bets.

This is obviously a good PR move for the bookie and means that they can close down with some style their market on most seats.

Paddy Power emphasises this it still has a full range of other General Election bets which are included in our roundup here.

Will other bookmakers follow suit? It will be interesting to see .

The interesting question is how this will go down with those wavering Labour voters who are fairly uncertain whether to vote or not. All the effort by the Labour campaign team to scare them to the polling station with threats of a Michael Howard government might be that bit harder.

Mike Smithson