Sometimes I get criticism from Lib Dem activists over the way I operate my site, Politicalbetting.com, and the usual complaint is that I am not operating it in the interests of the party.

Well, I don’t run it to further the Lib Dems or any other faction. It’s moved to its position as the UK’s most-read political website (four times the page down-loads of Iain Dale) because it seeks to provide a dispassionate information service and discussion platform for those who like forecasting and betting on political outcomes.

Occasionally party campaigners have found it useful to quote the site, and during the Leicester South by-election in 2004 its forecasts of a possible Lib Dem victory featured strongly in much of the party’s by-election literature.

On Henley I have not predicted a Lib Dem victory, but have revealed my own betting which was to risk £40 to win £1,000 on the party succeeding. My thinking was that in a fierce contest with the Tories the party always seems to do well, and there can be no better example than Bromley two years ago. So a bet based on a 5% chance of success looked great value and I recommended it to others. Based on current information I think that any price up to about a 12.5% probability looks good and worth a punt.

The other big bet on Henley, and where I’ve risked a lot of money, is that Labour will lose its deposit. That means its general election share of 14.5% of the vote will fall below 5%. Sounds a lot, but Brown’s party has a long history of being squeezed very badly in fierce CON-LD contests.

At Christchurch in 1993 it dropped to 2.7%, Newbury in the same year saw a drop to 2%, while in the re-run of Winchester in 1997 Labour came in with just 1.7% of the vote. Those were at a time, remember, when the party was soaring in the national polls.

Now, against a background of the rapid collapse of Labour’s national poll shares, I think that my money is safe even though I’ve bet at prices as tight as 1/3.

I’m convinced that one of the big stories on the morning of Brown’s first anniversary at Number 10 will be a lost deposit in Henley.

* Mike Smithson founded and edits PoliticalBetting.com, the UK’s leading political discussion blog. He was a founder member of the Liberal Democrats, stood for Parliament at the 1992 General Election, and has served as both a county and borough councillor. This is the fourth in a regular series of monthly articles from Mike.

Why is it that BBC’s election results programmes are so appalling? Just look at the “Ming’s Bling” clip, above, from last year and ask yourself whether this is the product of a licence funded broadcasting system that takes it public service obligations seriously?

What really gets me is that the BBC results programmes seem to want to focus on everything but giving the late evening/very early morning viewers what they desperately want – the results. For local elections we have to wait until all the results are in from a particular authority and then all the BBC gives us is a simple outline of the number of seats won and lost and the new make-up of the council.

People who stay up into the early hours don’t need something jazzed up like “Ming’s Bling”. They are watching because they want to know what is happening.

Surely in these days of mass information processing a voter should be able to find out on the night from the BBC what happened in the specific election that they participated in a few hours earlier?

OK – they cannot go through every ward result on TV programmes but they could use their web-site and link that into their coverage.

Over the past few months with the White House race I’ve been mightily impressed by the way the US networks do results programmes and the way that they link it in to their web-sites. You can find out what happened down almost to the smallest precinct of just a few hundred voter – and this is being constantly updated.

Yet here the corporation puts a vast amount of resource into coverage results, but it is all disparate and all over the place. Each local radio station and TV region has its own operation as well as the national programmes. But instead of giving us detailed results and analysis what they do is what is journalistically easy – get reaction.

Why not a bit of rationalisation to put the resources into getting a fast results service down to ward level together with quality analysis?

* Mike Smithson founded and edits PoliticalBetting.com, the UK’s leading political discussion blog. He was a founder member of the Liberal Democrats, stood for Parliament at the 1992 General Election, and has served as both a county and borough councillor. This is the third in a regular series of monthly articles from Mike.

At about 6pm in the evening on election day in 2005 I got a text from a Cowley Street staffer who gave upbeat reports about a number of key seats. It was promising and all the specific seats turned out to be spot on. But I made the terrible mistake of extrapolating this into an overall national picture that was much better than actually happened.

The result was that I placed what proved to be the most costly political bet of my life. This involved ‘buying’ Lib Dem seats on the spread-betting markets for several hundred pounds a point. The ‘buy’ level was at 67 seats my hope was that I would get my stake back multiplied by the number of MPs the party go in excess of 67.

Alas it was not to be. The party came in at 62 seats so my loss was the difference between that number and 67 multiplied by my stake. Ouch. Read more »

I asked a professional gambler recently – someone who made a decent tax-free living from his betting – if he could offer me some tips that I could follow. One of his suggestions, which he said had proved to be a sure-fire consistent money-earner, was to bet against the draw in cricket test matches.

He brought up a pile of statistics on his lap-top to show that the odds you can usually get on this option are better than the chances of it happening. The reason was simple – cricket punters have a long-standing record of over-estimating the chances of draws which in the modern game have become much less likely.

Thinking about this, it is the same with hung parliaments. There always seems to come a time in the run up to general elections when this becomes a big focus. We had it a lot in the periods before the 1983, 1987 and 1992 general elections and, of course, we are getting it at the moment. For Lib Dems it means that ever so tedious question about what we would do in such an eventuality.

For received opinion has it that Labour will find it very hard to win a fourth majority in succession, whilst the Tories have yet to prove that they can command the support and vote shares that will ensure a Conservative government.

Yet an inconclusive general election result has been very rare in post-war Britain. It has happened just once – in February 1974, after Edward Heath went to the country early on a “Who governs” platform in the middle of the fuel crisis, a miners’ strike and the three day week.

In 1992, the only general election I fought as a candidate, the widespread expectation was that the Tory government that had been elected 13 years earlier would lose its majority. Yet in those final 48 hours before voting, we all felt a hardening of opinion on the door-step. The public was not ready quite yet for Labour, and preferred to stick with what it knew. The Tories had a national vote margin of nearly 8% even though the polls were showing a dead heat.

My sense looking back at that election was that there was an abhorrence of an uncertain outcome. There was a desire to stick with what the public knew and was familiar with. Now I do not know whether something similar will happen with Gordon Brown in 2010, but I do believe that there will be a polarisation of opinion. This will produce a majority government for either of the two main parties.

People will either want the change that the Tories are promoting, or they will want to stick with what they know. So my betting is that there will be no hung parliament.

* Mike Smithson founded and edits PoliticalBetting.com, the UK’s leading political discussion blog. He was a founder member of the Liberal Democrats, stood for Parliament at the 1992 General Election, and has served as both a county and borough councillor. This is the first in a regular series of monthly articles from Mike.