After the little wobble the Chancellor is back in favour

There’s been a big move back to Brown on the Labour leadership betting markets overnight and his latest (0300 BST) best price is 0.46/1. The market still has some way to move before it gets to the 0.38/1 which is the best you could have got exactly a week ago when Tom Watson’s resignation started the ball rolling.

There does not seem to be a single reason for the market move – just a general change in mood that perhaps he has got this completely sown up. Whether this will last or not we will see.

But these leadership markets can chop and change very quickly as the chart shows.. It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that the latest Gordon price is almost exactly the same as the best you could have got on David Davis on September 25th 2005 a week before last year’s Tory conference. Then the Tory leadership betting prices were – Davis 0.47/1: Clark 4/1: Cameron 12.5/1: Fox 14.5/1: Rifkind 47/1.

One thing that can be quite confusing is the way that the media is reporting betting prices on the current race. There’s is a tendency for journalists to just use what one bookmaker is offering and this can be quite misleading.

The best indicator of market sentiment is the figure that we use which is based on the best price available at the time. Generally speaking, but not always, this is from the Betfair betting exchange.

Mike Smithson