2013: Lucky for some
AS OUR First Minister puts it, A Guid New Year to ane an' a. As we know, Alex Salmond likes a punt, so how about a £10 roll-up on the following scenario for 2013?
Europe costs both David Cameron and Nigel Farage their jobs, one for being insufficiently eurosceptic, the other for being too willing to compromise over a pact with the Tories.
Nick Clegg is ousted for the electoral oblivion he has foisted on the LibDems, Ed Miliband is so badly roughed up by John Simpson on the Today programme that it goes viral on the web and he has to resign in humiliation, and Alex Salmond shocks everyone for the second time in his career by resigning as SNP leader.
If you put your tenner on with William Hill at 500/1 for all five to leave office you now have £5010 rolling on your next set of bets.
UKIP wins a by-election (25/1), a General Election is called (4/1), and Boris Johnson is elected to Westminster (25/1). There you go. Your tenner wins you £16,933,800. Thanks to Graham Sharp at William Hill for the odds.
Bedtime reading
FOR those in need of something to send them to sleep, the Bank of England has published discussion paper No 36 from its Monetary Policy Unit.
It's on the subject of Britain's falling productivity rate, and has the title Estimation of Short Dynamic Panels In the Presence of Cross-sectional Dependence and Dynamic Heterogeneity.
It's bound to be a hit and could even rival the MPC's discussion paper No 26, a hot little number entitled Monetary Policies and Low-Frequency Manifestations of the Quantity Theory.
Of course, neither will beat what has hitherto been the insomniacs' bible – Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls' treatise on the joys of post neo-classical endogenous growth theory.
Catching flak
AS RECORDED elsewhere on these pages, Deputy PM Nick Clegg and the Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, Chloe Smith, will appear at the Lords Constitution Committee next week on topics from reform of the Upper House to the impact of giving 16-year-old Scots a referendum vote.
Smith, the 30-year-old Norwich North Tory MP was once known for being the youngest MP in the Commons and was made a Junior Treasury Minister.
But the nature of her fame changed last year when George Osborne sent her to defend a fuel duty U-turn on Newsnight – an assignment which made for car crash TV as Paxo ripped her to shreds. We trust their Lordships will be gentler with her.
Referendum bet
THEN there's referendum betting. The good news for Alex Salmond is that Ladbrokes are offering 1/500 on a Yes vote, in other words to win one pound you have to bet £500. The bad news is that it's the referendum for Falkland Islanders, where a yes vote will keep them under the Union Flag.
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