Spread your bets on Theresa May’s majority

Where’s all the unpredictability in politics gone? After the hubbub about a ‘crisis of liberalism’ and the thrills of punting on Trump and Brexit, election betting in 2017 is beginning to look almost boring. Everybody who wasn’t crazy — or excessively paranoid about the return of fascism — knew that Emmanuel Macron would beat Marine le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election. He did. That funny-looking anti-Islamist Geert Wilders did not triumph in Holland. And now it looks as if Angela Merkel will win re-election in Germany in September.

Closer to home, Theresa May looks all but certain to win a majority on 8 June — unless our polling companies have somehow become even more useless since 2015.

The fun, then, comes not from wagering on spectacular upsets, but in looking at the nitty-gritty. Most bookmakers now offer odds on details such as: what will the size of May’s majority be? At the moment, thanks in no small part to those remarkable local election results on 4 May, everybody expects a Tory landslide.