Your Prime Minister just went. Somewhere, a bet on the exact day quietly paid out.

This morning Keir Starmer announced he will resign — and the instant he spoke, somewhere a prediction-market contract on whether he would be gone by today, 22 June, paid out. People had been staking money on the date for weeks. On Polymarket, Andy Burnham has been priced around 77 per cent to be the next Prime Minister; a US president effectively called the result on Sunday. By the time the words left the lectern, the bet had already settled.

Which is exactly the moment to notice what watching it that way does to us. Humans are poor at holding uncertainty and we love a number that seems to dissolve it. "We don't know" is unbearable; "77 per cent" is strangely soothing. A prediction market sells precisely that relief — it takes an anxious, open question about how we are governed and hands it back as a tidy, moving price. For a clever, time-poor person checking her phone on the train, the odds are far easier to digest than the policy.

But watch what the price quietly changes in you. When you follow politics as a market, you slip from citizen to spectator — and from spectator, a short step further, to gambler. The question stops being "how should this country be run" and becomes "who called it right." Being correct about the outcome starts to feel like having a stake in it. It is not the same thing. The market pays you for accuracy, not for citizenship, and the two can pull in opposite directions.

Be fair to the markets, too. They are sometimes sharp — they tracked some recent elections better than the pundits — and they are sometimes just a herd with money on. The figures move on sentiment, and a single loud post can shift them, which is why they "fluctuate in real time." A price is a mood reading, not a fact about tomorrow. Read it as you would a weather forecast made by the crowd, not the weather.

This is the same quiet problem this paper keeps circling. When the decisions that shape your life are made over your head — by 81 Labour MPs, by a foreign president, by the bond market — even your own politics arrives as something to bet on rather than something to shape. The betting line is the spectator's consolation prize for a missing say. It hands you the feeling of being involved while asking nothing of you.

The bet has settled; the contest to replace him has not. So if you must, keep one eye on the new odds over the coming weeks. Just keep the other on the policy — because the policy is the only part of this you actually get a vote on, and no amount of being right about the odds will cast it for you.