Wednesday 26 June 2024

How to win a bet by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

 

There’s no doubt that the little scandal about betting on the date of the election has provided a significant boost for Sunak’s Project Oblivion. Whilst many – including some in his own party – criticised him for dragging things out before taking any action, that’s because they don’t understand the objective. Delaying action, leading to repeated headlines over two weeks, can only have assisted in the fulfilment of his project. He claims to have been incredibly angry about the whole saga, but chances are that the part which upset him most was a Labour candidate getting in on the act. After all, the Tory majority in that seat last time round was a little over 20,000, so in the context of the 2024 election it wasn’t even a marginal. It was a racing certainty that Labour would win, further reducing the total in the Tory column. In a blow to his project, Sunak now has to face the probability that the Tories might even hold the seat. Worse, tarring Labour with the same brush runs the risk that the Tories might hold on to a few other seats as well.

It wasn’t quite the same scandal as that besetting the Tories; rather than using insider knowledge, this Labour candidate was betting on the outcome of an event in which he had at least a degree of agency. The extent to which he chose to campaign or not campaign could, in theory, affect the chances of him winning, even if victory looked inevitable to everyone else regardless of what he did. It’s not easy for a Labour candidate in 2024 to lose an election in which he starts only 20,000 votes behind. Paradoxically, Starmer’s quick action against him has probably helped him to lose the election – and win the bet. In electoral terms, it’s a sort of lose-lose outcome: neither Sunak nor Starmer gets the result they wanted in the constituency.

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