Football, horse racing and cards used to be my order of betting losses but the Lib Dems have just shot politics to the top of the charts.
Who saw it coming? Really? I was pretty confident the PM would win one and lose one. Wakefield was a cert but that Tiverton result was something else.
The Lib Dems, in the run up to it, were not confident either, or else gave an absolute masterclass in expectation management.
As late as the early hours of Friday morning they were worried, then quietly confident, then worried again, then – ultimately – ecstatic.
Quite the win, to say the least. As Chris Hopkins from market researchers Savanta ComRes wrote: “A 24,000+ majority overturned, the second 20,000+ majority to be lost since Partygate broke.
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“Yes, this is a by-election, and usual by-election rules apply, but 290-odd Conservative MPs have a seat less secure than Tiverton and Honiton, and the sheer scale of this defeat is bound to restart murmurings of coups to oust the Prime Minister.”
And there we go. Good news for Mr Johnson is that he’s out of the country for a bit and the train strikes have reduced Westminster to a ghost town.
But next week, MPs will be back and plotting will resume. He’s away until Friday, so that’s plenty of time.
This was always going to be a crunch week for Mr Johnson. Privately, Number 10 expected to lose Wakefield and squeak home in Tiverton.
It would have been tricky to lose one, but spinnable. To lose two is not good.
Despite the PM saying it would be “crazy” for him to walk over this, lots of people in SW1 think it’s crazy for him to stay on. This is damage – for a normal person.
The thing is, with this guy, he will stay on. You can’t embarrass him out of the place. He’s hell-bent on winning another election.
Legacy, he calls it and who cares what happens to the Tory Party and – indeed – the country in the process.
Remember the ego we’re dealing with here. This is a man who, when he was a journalist and asked about his desire to go into politics, said: “They don’t put up statues to journalists.”
Nothing about public service, or the country, or the people. A statue.
Maybe he will get one, but at this rate it will be like the end of Planet of the Apes: a desolate UK beach, with a half-buried Boris Johnson statue sticking out the sand, clutching a pint glass – complete with imperial markings – as Charlton Heston bangs the sand and cries: “You maniac, you blew it all up.”
In retrospect, we should have left him on that zip line all those years ago.
I was looking at the image from 2012 again the other night, and doesn’t it sum him up perfectly? Suit and tie, a Union Jack in each hand, ridiculous helmet on, just stuck there. Suspended above an incredulous crowd.
Isn’t that how he should be remembered? A buffoon who floated over us for a little while then got stuck. Hanging there, useless and ludicrous. Funny at first in the sheer absurdity of it.
Then, like the man himself, tragic to the point of being pathetic.
You stop laughing at some point, and say, “For God’s sake someone cut him down”.
It’ll have to be his own backbenchers now, but they really, really need to get a move on.
