I saw a screenshot of a newspaper article the other day – I can’t find it now, but I think it might have been in the Press & Journal or something like that, and it suggested that Humza Yousaf is odds-on with a bookies’ firm to be replaced as First Minister before the end of this calendar year, presumably on the assumption that the SNP will suffer losses at the general election and Yousaf will have to pay the penalty. This prompted me to look up the odds for who might succeed him, but to my surprise I couldn’t find any on the leading betting sites I initially checked. That in itself should perhaps worry the SNP, because it might suggest that political observers south of the border are already semi-consciously “moving on” from the era of the SNP as the third party at Westminster. If so, that could have more important consequences such as a downgrade in the status given to the SNP in the TV leaders’ debates and so on. They’ve got to somehow keep themselves looking as relevant as possible – frankly, junking the de facto referendum plan was one of the stupidest decisions they’ve ever made and the best thing they could do would be to simply reverse it.
Yousaf is odds-on to be gone within a year – but who might replace him?
Anyway, I eventually managed to find some SNP leadership odds on the website of McBookie, the Scottish firm which had been quoted by the newspaper article…
Kate Forbes 5/2
Mairi McAllan 5/1
Mhairi Black 5/1
Angus Robertson 6/1
Neil Gray 10/1
Ben Macpherson 12/1
Shona Robison 16/1
Jenny Gilruth 25/1
Joanna Cherry 25/1
Alex Salmond 50/1
Alyn Smith 50/1
Ian Blackford 50/1
Stephen Flynn 100/1
Michael Stewart 500/1
The renowned letter-writing impartial Liberal Democrat election expert Mike Smithson of Stormfront Lite fame always used to say that the reason political betting can be more profitable than sports betting is that bookies feel obliged to offer markets on politics, but often quote somewhat naive odds due to their own lack of knowledge on the subject, which can mean opportunities for genuine value bets if you look carefully for the mistakes. I’d suggest that may be the case here, although I don’t want to be too confident in saying that in case I end up costing anyone money.
But on the face of it, Kate Forbes looks like the obvious value bet. She’s rightly favourite but the odds are still quite generous – you’d win two-and-a-half times whatever you stake. I’m not suggesting she should be odds-on, because you have to factor in the chance that she might not stand at all for family reasons, and also that the continuity faction will be determined to stop her. However, she’s positioned herself perfectly as the change option, which is likely to capture the zeitgeist if the leadership election occurs after a general election humbling for the SNP. I also can’t see the kind of monstering she suffered last spring having the same kind of effect a second time – everyone knows all about her religious and social views now, so that’s all factored in. I reckon her true odds should be somewhere between evens and 2/1, so 5/2 looks a little tempting.
Mhairi Black, on the other hand, should be nowhere near 5/1, so I wouldn’t touch that with a bargepole. If McBookie are assuming a greater than 50% chance of a vacancy immediately after the general election, how can Black even stand? She won’t have a seat in any parliament at that point. Mairi McAllan’s position as joint second favourite will also raise a few eyebrows – I would guess the idea is that the Sturgeonites will unite behind a single champion as they did with Yousaf and that McAllan currently looks like the most telegenic option on offer. But she’s still awfully young and inexperienced. Would she even want that weight upon her shoulders at such an early stage in her career? Would potential backers not look to a more seasoned figure instead, when it really came down to it?
Alex Salmond is at 50/1, and you might wonder if it’s unprecedented for a member of one party to be listed as a leadership contender for another party. But in fact on the Betfair exchange Nigel Farage is currently listed at similar odds to be the next leader of the Conservative party.
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