Anybody who has just read Ben Brogan’s report that Sir Ian Blair might walk should call William Hill about a market that was launched two hours earlier.

This is the email I got from the firm “William Hill are offering odds of 6/4 that Sir Ian Blair will cease to be Metropolitan Police Commissioner on or before December 31, 2007 – and 1/ 2 that he will still be in the job on that date. ‘Controversy is raging over whether Sir Ian Blair should remain in his job. We believe he is likely to remain in place beyond the end of this year’ said William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe.”

That seems like good value to me. I think you have to phone to get your money on as it does not appear to be available online.

Apologies to the Observer and Mori I have received the following email from the Mori founder, Bob Worcester, about my story yesterday

The Observer never saw the Monitor, and when they commissioned the ‘quickie’, in the heat of the battle, the Deputy Editor and I agreed that we wouldn’t dump on our own doorstep by releasing the Monitor and spoiling the quickie, and that was before I had any idea what the quickie would show . If we’d not eventually released the Monitor results, then your accusation of suppression would certainly have been well founded, but we did.

That’s a fair point and I’m sorry if I was wrong. But my general point was that if details of the 13% Labour poll had been available as the Tories were assembling in Blackpool then it could have affected the whole tone. Instead we had the Mori 7% Labour lead story.

Mike Smithson