The money piles on Cameron

In the immediate aftermath of his afternoon’s first round ballot of Tory MPs the David Cameron price has moved to 0.32/1 on the betting exchanges and 2/7 with the conventional bookies.

This compares with the 0.38/1 in the Labour leader betting that’s currently available on the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to take over from Tony Blair as Labour leader.

Apart from Ken Clarke the big loser from this evening’s vote must surely be David Davis who polled at four votes less than the number of Tory MPs who has said in public that they were supporting him. There’d been a strong view that the reason he attracted so much early public support was that he looked like the winner. Now that has gone can he hang on to to his 62 and put on more votes to stave off the Liam Fox challenge.

The assumption must be that a large part of Ken Clarke 38 votes will move to David Cameron. Not many are going to move to Davis or Fox.

So the big question for Thursday is how the aggregate 108 votes chalked up by Fox and Davis will divide? This is a very close call and Fox must surely have a chance.

But there are still two days to go and anything could happen in this remarkable contest.

Leadership Betting
Best betting exchange prices; Cameron 0.31/1: Davis 5.6/1: Fox 9.5/1
Best bookmaker prices; Cameron 2/7: Davis 4/1: Fox 9/1
IG’s Binary spread-market. Cameron 64-72: Davis 17-23: Fox 6-10

Mike Smithson