Back in 2017, a few weeks before the general election I wrote a blog post titled “Political betting for the 2017 UK General Election” for people like me who enjoy politics and the occasional flutter. I made recommendations for bets that were good value in my opinion. I’ve republished it here.
I found the post earlier today when I as going through some old files. It was published April 19th, 51 days before the result was known. As I have an hour to kill while I wait for Love Yoga Crew to teach her class, I though I would look up the results and see how much I would have lost.
I’ll list each bet here and calculate returns to a £100 stake. These fantasy bets would have needed to be singles due to related contingency.
- Conservatives to win the most seats @ 1/16 – win
- Conservatives to form the next UK government @ 1/6 – win
- Theresa May to be Prime Minister After General Election @ 1/10 – win
- Hung Parliament, no @ 1/12 – lose
- Labour vote percentage 25-30% @ 9/4 – lose
- UKIP vote percentage of 5-10% @ 6/4 – lose
- Registered voter turnout 55.01-60.0% @ 8/1 – lose
- Total seats – Plaid Cymru, 4 or above @ 8/13 – won
So that’s a total stake of £800 which would have returned… £494.46. A loss of £305.54. I didn’t actually lose that money, just so we are clear. It was a just a game.
I’m not going to make excuses gambling is a mugs game and you should only bet what you can afford to lose. What I will do though is try and find an explanation for how I went so wrong.
I think the biggest contributing factor was Jeremy Corbyn’s excellent performance. He was the Labour Party’s leader and seemed to capture the mood of young people perfectly.
This article from The Guardian explains how Corbyn manage to use the energy of a disaffected youth to increase his turnout and make the election a real contest. Labour we polling 25% at the time I made the prediction of 25-30% vote share but he smashed that with an eventual share of 40%. His support also increased the total turnout and ruined my low turnout prediction.
In retrospect, his (open secret) Brexity credentials convinced many UKIP voters to return to Labour and didn’t seem to put off remainers. I had thought that UKIP’s vote share would tumble, but to go from 12.6% in 2015 to 1.8% in 2017 is ridiculous.
The final loser is the one I’m most unhappy with. The result was technically a hung parliament as the Conservatives only managed to get 317 seats out of the 326 seats needed for a majority, which killed my 1/12 hung parliament, no prediction. The thing is, Conservative leader Theresa May managed to arrange a confidence and supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party who are basically the Northern Irish wing of the Conservative Party. Rules are rules though and the bet was a loser.