The sun is out and the polls will open in just over seven days time and the betting markets are telling us one thing loud and clear, the punters believe that Reform UK will go a lot better than their odds suggest.

Neil Monnery takes a look at the latest news from the campaign and notes that Nigel Farage’s party are getting plenty of support…

*You can check out all of our latest General Election Odds over at betfred.com

If we head into the trusty time machine, back to the middle of December 2019, we’d see a cheering Boris Johnson having led the Conservatives to a big win and sealing the deal for Brexit. He was no doubt helped by Nigel Farage deciding to step down his candidates from Tory-held constituencies but even without that, it was a sensational victory and significantly more decisive than anyone could have expected.

If on that day, someone from the future told you that come the next General Election, the same party would not even be second-favourites to win the most seats in the House of Commons, no-one would have believed them and the reliability of time-travel would most certainly be brought into question.

A lot of course has happened since then. Who could ever have seen Covid-19 pandemic coming or the Partygate scandal arising from Lockdown? The thought that Boris Johnson wouldn’t still be Prime Minister would be preposterous but his replacement isn’t even the person leading the Conservatives into the General Election.

Then when everything was still going wrong for the party of government, they get themselves into in a betting scandal of all things, where seemingly a bunch of people in the know bet on the date of the next General Election safe in the knowledge that they were guaranteed to win.

It has been one thing after another and whilst that will all but certainly lead to a Labour government, the traders here at Betfred no longer believe that the Tories have the second-best chance to get the most seats.

Reform UK have supplanted the Conservatives in that market, currently trading at 40/1 with the Tories available to back at 50/1. Labour are of course the overwhelming favourites at 1/66.

Seeing odds like these is just another sign that this campaign isn’t exactly going swimmingly for Rishi Sunak and his party.

Bets are clearly coming in on Reform UK and their candidates. Nigel Farage is now just 1/8 to win Clacton and Richard Tice is now 11/10 to take Boston & Skegness, that was 5/1 when the market opened. Support is out there is the country for the party and clearly, that support is seeping into the betting markets as well.

In the 'To win most seats without Labour' market though, Reform UK are still considered the third choice at 20/1, with the Lib Dems (3/1) behind the Tories at 1/4. If I was a Reform UK supporter and saw those odds, I'd be much more interested in them rather than the 40/1 to win the most seats in total.

Labour are about to win a landslide and anything but a big win for Sir Keir Starmer would be staggering. Second place though does seem genuinely up for grabs and just typing that sentence is bewildering in itself.

We’ll cover this ongoing story from now through to General Election day itself from our team here at Betfred Insights. Keep checking out our coverage from the Next Prime Minister markets through to key individual constituencies over the coming weeks as we follow the twists and turns from a betting perspective for the 2024 General Election in our Politics Betting Tips section.