Should you take the 100/1 shot in Buckingham?
Could it be Stevens not Farage who floors Bercow?
One of the great side-shows in the election is the scrap in Buckingham where the speaker, John Bercow, is seeking to defend his seat. The main parties are following the convention of not standing against him but there are one or two tricky opponents who might cause him problems.
The efforts by ex-UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, have been well documented and he must be in with a chance.
But there’s another threat from an apparently well-resourced campaign being mounted against both Bercow and UKIP by a body calling itself the Buckinghamshire Campaign for Democracy. Their candidate is the former Tory MEP for the area, John Stevens who is pro-EU.
Bercow is clearly vulnerable on his expenses and the Stevens campaign is exploiting that quite effectively – part of one leaflet is reproduced above and they are hoping to pick up a fair chunk of those who voted Labour and Lib Dem there in 2005.
A danger for them, given their hostility to UKIP, is that their effort could let Farage in. This could be an an interesting three-way tussle.
Whatever I’ve been impressed enough to take a punt and overnight I got £40 on Stevens at 100/1 with Ladbrokes.