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 its 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 eerie, 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.
It’s devilishly divisive, because half of Reform right this minute isn’t thinking about Labour at all, they’re yelling: “We’ll see their Great Clarification Act and raise them a final purification bill”, while the other half is cooing: “Leave it, lads, they’re not worth it.” Outflank or ignore? Reform could lose the next six months to this question, then end with half of the party defecting. Or it could endlessly contort itself, trying to amplify candidates who sound more like Restore, until no one can remember the difference and the only Farage-fans left are simply sentimentally attached to him.
Reform won’t like it up ’em, which makes it all the more delightful to watch, but that doesn’t alter the fact that every political figure or party emerging to tout more cheap fascism is changing the centre of political gravity, changing what’s allowable in public discourse, changing the conversations in the Moral Maze production office, where they consider which guest can most politely make the case for an ethno-nationalist points-based benefit system and mass deportations. In other words, Restore Britain isn’t funny, even if its immediate impact is quite funny.
The danger I see is that Labour could take the exact wrong message from this. It will never see itself as it is: bystander-beneficiary of Reform’s misfortune. It will decide that it snuffed out Reform by answering people’s “legitimate concerns” about immigration with Shabana Mahmood’s right-lite posturing. It will think its voters are returning to the fold, every Mandelson-misstep, every U-turn forgiven. It could think this is carte blanche to be exactly as it was, only more so.
Still, enjoy the moment. Only six months ago, Reform did look, if not unassailable, at least chillingly self-assured. The early adopter Tim Montgomerie, who set up the Conservative Home website back in the day, told me in the autumn he intended to do the same for Reform, and I said: “What are you going to call it, Refome?”, and he said: “No, I’m going to call it 900 days.” Some exceedingly quick maths later, I realised he meant that that was the number of days before he thought it would be in government. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that my blood ran cold.
So this would be a good moment to recognise both how frothy these times are, and that – however often you stand there, pointing at other people’s froth – few of us are immune to it; things go from impossible to inevitable fast, and then back again. One bad press conference can blow a hole in a watertight plan, but at the same time enough fake certainty can make it look like a great press conference, which no amount of factchecking can deflate. The only way to stay sober in this heady atmosphere is to have an independent oxygen supply, which is to say, a plan and some values of your own. That’s the lesson Labour could and should take from being frontrunner. It’s not much but it’s hope.
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
