Do we want another five years of the holepunch-hurling horror of Gordon Brown's management style? Photo: Alamy  I love newspaper headlines, the way that they shout at you competitively from the stand on a Sunday morning – imploring your attention like a bunch of gape-mouthed nestlings. I have always admired the art with which the headline writer will take the story before him and bleach it of conditionals, sharpening and condensing and pushing it to the limit of credibility so that the faltering fingers of the deluded consumer will feel unable to resist. And yet in all my years of knowing chuckling at the headlines, I don't think I have ever come across such a brazen confection of suggestio falsi and suppressio veri as appeared yesterday in large print across one of the Sundays. "Brown on course to win election," it said.  When I had regained my breath, I thought of some other propositions the headline writer might have touted – with an equal measure of foundation. How about "Pope on course to win Wimbledon"? Or "Simon Heffer on course to win Miss World"? Or if you want a more direct analogy, what about "One-legged man on course to win arse-kicking contest"?  I have an answer for all those befuddled by the recent mutability of the polls. May I direct you to Betfair, a political betting website that in my experience is almost uncanny in its accuracy. Here you are looking at the predictions that people are willing to defend with their own money, and the money is still overwhelmingly on the Tories. The single most likely outcome – and you can actually watch as the bets go down and the stakes mount up – is that the Tories will have a comfortable overall majority, easily enough to govern for five years. As for the idea that Gordon Brown 's Labour Party could win the election , with an overall majority – that possibility has been flatlining for months at between five and 10 per cent. The reason I trust the punters of Betfair more than I trust a poll in a Sunday paper is that the punters have thought it through with the care of those investing their own money.  They have put themselves in the position of the tens of millions of sensible men and women who will be going to the polling stations in the next few weeks. The gamblers have focused hardheadedly on the reality of the choice.  There you are on May 6 (or whenever), pencil poised. Are you really going to give Gordon Brown another five years in Downing Street? This is a Government that has spent the past two years lurching disastrously from one abortive putsch to another. One by one, they have stepped up to plunge the rubber dagger into his impervious back, from Clarke to Hoon to Hewitt to Alistair Darling himself, while the atmosphere has become so poisonous that some talents – Siôn Simon and James Purnell, for example – have not only abandoned their ministerial careers, but given up on the Commons altogether.  Do we really want another five years of the holepunch-hurling horror of Gordon Brown's management style? Do we want the Downing Street switchboard to be endlessly jammed with people bleating to some "bullying helpline"? Is this any way to run a country? And that is just froth compared to the real charges against Labour.  This is a Government that is so addicted to regulation that it has banned about 9,000 courses of human conduct, and done so much damage to the wealth and job-creating sectors of the economy that youth unemployment is higher now than it was 13 years ago when Labour came in, and the gap between rich and poor is bigger than ever.  This is a Government so addicted to political correctness that it has failed in the biggest and noblest ambition of Tony Blair – to tackle educational inequality. Labour has very largely failed to restore authority to teachers; and that is why we have so many bright children who are still held back by their classroom environment; and that is why we have seen a decline in social mobility; and that is why this Labour Government is driven to ever more audacious social engineering, in the desperate hope of reversing the growing dominance of the affluent middle classes in admissions to Russell Group universities – when the problem is not with the universities, but with the schools. Is it not time for reforms that encourage good teachers, and encourage good people to go into teaching?  This is a dying Labour Government whose bankrupt economic policies have left us with a 13 per cent deficit, bigger than that of Greece, and with an ever larger sector of the workforce paid for by the state, and with a private sector facing an ever larger bill to fund it all. Are we really going to continue with an economic model that means the Government is paying the salaries of 70 per cent of the workforce in Newcastle-upon-Tyne? Are we really going to try to muddle along for ever with a top rate of tax considerably higher than all our relevant competitors – higher than in Italy, Australia, China, America, Switzerland and even higher than in France and Germany? Do we really want Hattie Harman to spend the next five years cooking up more of her gender-based regulations on business? Are we going to let Labour ultimately get away with the lies over Iraq, the conniving with Guantánamo, the chaotic handling of our border controls, the fraudulent policy on the Lisbon Treaty? Well, are we?  I don't think so. I reckon the voters will enter those polling stations and give a chance to a sensible and compassionate Conservative administration, that brings new thinking to education, that begins the hard work of tackling the deficit, and that gives encouragement and support to the wealth-creating sectors of the economy, in the knowledge that this is ultimately the only way to generate the cash to help the poorest and the neediest. That's why I am inclined in my election predictions to go with the punters and not the pollsters. If Gordon Brown is on course to win the election, then Elvis Presley is on course to win The X Factor and Shergar to win the Grand National.
Forget the polls and keep an eye on the bookies &ndash; voters will give the Tories    a chance, says Boris Johnson.