More than £1,000,000 matched on Betfair market It might have been the closeness of the result or the fact that both candidates for PM were relatively well known in the UK but the Italian general election has attracted a vast amount of interest and a lot of money has been staked. Overnight alone on the Betfair market the total of matched bets chalked up has been over £700,000 taking the total to just on £1,100,000. These totals have only been…
Who’ll be ahead in the Camera in the morning? With traffic on the site reaching record levels I’m opening up a new Italian election thread to ease some of the strain on the PB.C server. With thousands of people trying to open up a 400-comment thread at the same time it is inevitable that things will be slow. Please post here from now on. Many thanks – and good luck. Mike Smithson
Will “Lucky Tony’s” friend manage to squeeze in? An evening of high tension in Italy has led to hectic trading on the Betfair market as the prices on Silvano Berlusconi and Roman Prodi has moved from one to the other as more information came in. As soon as the polls closed the exit surveys seemed to show that Prodi had it and prices swung sharply his way. Then as real results started to emerge there’s been huge swings. At one…
Could Rentoul be right – that the unthinkable is now thinkable? In the ongoing turbulence over the Labour succession the main developments over the weekend have been a hint by the former Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, that he might run for the job and an extraordinary piece by John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday suggesting that Gordon Brown could be sacked. The Milburn move came in a TV interview in which he repeatedly refused to rule himself out of…
The election that saw Anthony Eden’s victory for the Tories When the House of Lords voted to allow the broadcasting of their work in the House of Peers (which led to the broadcasting of the House of Commons), I doubt any of them paid attention to the question “What happens when we’re not at work?”. Well, in this age of multi channel television, BBC Parliament (who holds the responsibility of broadcasting Parliamentary activities) came across a corker of an idea….
Punters turn to Prodi as the polls open Italians begin two days of voting this morning with the betting markets at least thinking that it is all over for the media tycoon turned politician, Silvio Berlusconi. Under Italian law opinion polls are banned within two weeks of an election so there is no way of knowing whether Tony Blair’s holiday host of eighteen months ago is going to hang on. The markets, as the chart shows, have been moving away…
Tories up 2 – Labour down 2 – LDs no change With the David Cameron set to make his first Tory conference speech since his election as leader there’s news of a recovery in the party’s position from ICM – the UK’s leading telephone pollster. The last time ICM reported, in the Sunday Telegraph a fortnight ago, the party was down at the General Election level of 33% four points behind Labour. The latest numbers are:- CON 35%(+2): LAB 35%(-2):…
So what about the minor parties? One feature of the past 10 years has been the growing willingness of the voters to vote for minor parties. This has been seen at both local level, and at Parliamentary level, with the election of Dr. Richard Taylor, George Galloway, and Peter Law in 2005. These are not old-style Independents (often Conservatives by another name), nor are they the Residents and Ratepayers Associations that still feature in some authorities. They are more likely…