Why isn’t the Chancellor’s price tightening?

After this morning’s Populus Poll showing that neither John Reid or Alan Johnson would do better against Cameron than Gordon Brown I finally came to the view that it would take very unusual circumstances indeed for the Chancellor not to succeed Tony Blair.

My line until now was that what could derail Brown’s chances would be hard polling evidence that another contender would perform better.

That could still happen of course but it is hard to see, following last month’s conference, how a rival could gather the public momentum that would demonstrate to the party that he or she was the right choice.

Given that we now have relatively firm time-scale and only one real contender the great mystery is why, as the above chart shows, you can still get the very generous 0.54/1 on Brown doing it. In a normal betting situation you would expect that to tighten.

On the betting exchanges some punters are investing a fair amount of cash keeping that price where it is. To lay at those levels those betting against Brown are getting 1.85/1 in return for their money. That does not seem a big return for what seems like a big risk.

Maybe I’m not reading this?

Mike Smithson