Come On, Kamala

I've been monitoring the betting for Next American President quite closely, it being said that bookmakers usually get it right. Not always in horse racing, they don't. And I've been told about a $45m bet on Trump that has skewed the odds but it's some bookie that'll take odds of such almost 50-50 proportions for that amount. Your olde worlde street corner shop with a careworn man working out 8/11 on the back of a fag packet would be looking to lay most of that off.

However, it's still distressing to see Trump at 4/6 and so given a 60% chance of four more years of bigotry, narcissism and vacant rambling, repeating the last lines of his stanzas like a refrain, like a refrain. What can America be thinking for such a result to even be thinkable, except America isn't thinking that. More of them will vote for Kamala than they will for Trump but they, like us, have a strange way of appointing a government after distorting how the people have voted. Like Corbyn got thrashed having won more votes than Keir who was given a vast majority to fritter away over the next five years.

What is even weirder in a way, though, is how Trump is 4/6 but the Republicans are 8/13, which represents at this late stage quite a difference between the next President being Republican and it being Trump so does that fraction show up the perceived likelihood that Trump will be 'removed', by whatever means, before he can take up the post if he were to win the Election.

Kamala might not appear to be FDR or Obama, or not yet, but she's a vast improvement on the choices that were on offer when this campaign began. She at least wants to 'keep hope alive', as Jesse Jackson would have said, rather than lead the world into darkness, retribution and an insular, gaga vanity project.

Democracy isn't perfect. Hitler got himself voted in. Those of us of a certain age have been lucky to have lived in a time of some sort of consensus whatever we might have said or thought about Blair, John Major, Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and suchlike at the time. But maybe, as in any sport, analysts work out how to play it to their advantage. Something about Trump and Boris won them the game once. I'd like to think, but almost daren't, that the UK won't get fooled again but it looks as if the USA, having fallen for the fool's mate once, are going to walk straight back into it only two games later.

I took very short odds about Hillary Clinton at a much later stage than this eight years ago and, having backed Remain, too, that year it reduced 2016's betting profit significantly and so much, much shorter odds than 4/6 can be overturned at the eleventh hour but it's beginning to look as if they'll need to be.