There’s greater than a 1.25% chance that Emily Thornberry will be next PM
My little punt this afternoon
One of the things about running a site about political betting and being a punter myself is that I like to spend a few minutes each day casting my eye over the markets to see if anything interesting is happening.
I’m usually on the lookout for long odds bets where my assessment of the chances of it coming off is better than how the market is pricing it.
One such one I took this afternoon. It was at the place of 80 on Betfair that Emily Thornberry will be the next prime minister.
We’ve discussed at length how before how difficult it is going to be for a LAB PM to come directly after Mrs. May. That would require the incumbent to continue until after she has lost another general election and the widespread perception is CON MPs are not going to let her do that.
The general view is probably right but, as we saw with Gordon Brown in the years before GE2010 there was a great reluctance to oust an incumbent PM with a general election not that too far away. The same could happen with Mrs. May.
Although Corbyn is the strong second favourite to be next PM you’ve got to go down a long way, in my case to odds of 80, to find another LAB MP as a contender and that person is Thornberry – the clear favourite to succeed JC.
Given the massive ambivalence that Corbyn and his inner circle has on Brexit we cannot assume that he’ll stay in post all the way to the general election. He’s also getting old.