Great news! Bookies think Labour can win the next election. Bad news! It’s down to Elon Musk | Zoe Williams

2026-02-25 - 10:03

The Reform vote is being eaten into by the Musk-backed Restore Britain, led by Rupert Lowe. I fear that Labour may read the wrong message from all this It’s just one bookie and it’s just one February day in the week of a chaotic byelection, but it’s happened: for the first time in 18 months, Star Sports has staked Labour as most likely to win the general election. “Keir Starmer’s party have been in the ascendency in the market,” said their head of betting, William Kedjanyi, “shortening into 13/8 from 15/8 in the past week to supplant Reform at the head of the betting.” Meanwhile, Reform UK has gone the other way as the party’s odds have drifted from 13/8 to 15/8. Normally, I would query how meaningful that was; how do you tell the difference, in a political gambling market definitionally run on hot air, between rising fortunes and last-ditch flailing? But Kedjanyi, outside a conference fringe meeting some years ago, successfully explained to me how odds worked, when I’d already been pretending to understand them for decades. So at the very least, I know he’s right about one thing: if you’d score 13 quid off an £8 stake at Starmer’s victory, and £15 from the same at Nigel Farage’s, then things are less bleak for Labour than they seem. In no particular order, here are the reasons to be cheerful, but not giddy: Star Sports attributes this as Reform’s loss rather than Labour’s win, pointing to the challenger party Restore Britain, founded by the Elon Musk-backed MP Rupert Lowe, as the real source of Farage’s problems. The fringe organisation’s policies include returning the Great British pub to the centre of Great British cultural life, and bringing in “a Great Clarification Act to reassert parliamentary sovereignty over the courts, the repeal of the Equality Act and Human Rights Act, withdrawal from the European convention on human rights, and the abolition of Britain’s asylum system in its current form”. Let’s not sweat the far-right posturing and the eery, gaslit nostalgia of the language: it’s only interesting in so far as Restore Britain is doing to Reform what Reform did to the Tories, taking its basest instincts and pushing them just that little bit further. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink? On Monday 30 April, ahead of the May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour is under from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the party. Book tickets here Continue reading...