Keir Starmer will not be Prime Minister by the end of 2026, Kemi Badenoch will not be ruling the roost over the Tories and England will not win the World Cup.
While the last of these predictions hardly proves a gift for foresight, they are all likely to come true if the past record of the soothsayer who has foretold them is anything to go by.
For the last four years, Iain Mansfield – a former government special adviser – has organised a game which challenges people to predicts how British politics, the economy, international affairs, science, the arts and other events will unfold over the next 12 months.
It has evolved into the UK’s biggest online forecasting competition, with a record 1,109 entries this year.
While the game is primarily for fun, as The i Paper reported last year, the exercise also should have some predictive power for how 2026 will unfold.
Wisdom of the Crowds
This is due to a well-documented phenomenon called the “Wisdom of Crowds”, whereby the collective opinion of a group of people often provides a better judgement than that of a single expert.
This happens because when a large group of individuals with diverse perspectives provide independent estimates on a topic, the aggregate of the estimates tends to cancel out the individual biases and errors.
Last year, 373 people entered Mansfield’s competition, and the average of their predictions – the Wisdom of the Crowd – outperformed 93 per cent of them. It also beat the vast majority of a 100-strong group of people with jobs in politics, public policy and journalism (your author included).
In the competition, contestants are asked to predict the probability of 50-odd things happening, scoring the likelihood as a percentage between 0 and 100.
Examples for 2025 included the chance of Reform outpolling Labour and the Tories by the end of the year, and Donald Trump imposing tariffs on Britain. It also predicted Elon Musk would be fired from the White House.
In 2025, the Wisdom of the Crowd was better than most people at predicting not just what would happen, but how likely things were to happen – everything that it predicted to have at least a 75 per cent chance of occurring came true.
Because the competition involves a larger group of people this year – including 378 who work in jobs connected to politics or public policy – it should be even more accurate than in 2025.
What has the Wisdom of the Crowd predicted for 2026?
The obvious place to start is with the story which has been dominating Westminster for the last two weeks – whether Starmer will hang on in No 10.
It does not make easy reading for the Prime Minister: according to the Wisdom of the Crowd, there is only a 64 per cent likelihood that he will still be in Downing Street by 31 December 2026 (although given the peril he appeared to be in on Monday, perhaps he would happily take those odds).
All the predictions in this year’s competition were submitted by 18 January – before the latest Mandelson scandal erupted.
Starmer’s position has certainly deteriorated significantly since last year, when the Wisdom of the Crowd thought there was a 92 per cent chance that he would be Prime Minister by the end of 2025.
However, things look no brighter for Kemi Badenoch, with the Wisdom of the Crowd also rating her chance of remaining Conservative Party leader at 64 per cent. Nigel Farage is on considerably firmer ground, with a 90 per chance that he will still be leader of Reform UK.
The Wisdom of the Crown thinks there is a 59 per cent chance that Reform will win the most seats in the local elections – but only a 41 per chance that it will win the most seats in the Senedd elections in Wales – and a 66 per cent chance that Labour will lose at least half the seats they are defending in the locals.
However, Reform are not expected to decisively breakaway from the other parties in their national polling – the chance that they will be polling at an average of 33 per cent or higher by the year’s end was rated as 46 per cent (they are currently hovering around 28 per cent).
International predictions
In America, the Wisdom of the Crowd thought there was a 71 per cent likelihood the Democrats would win control of the House in the mid-term elections, but a 51 per cent they would win the Senate.
Ominously, the crowd thought there was a 57 per cent chance that US actions would be the principal cause of regime change in at least one country other than Venezuela.
In Ukraine, the most likely scenario is seen as continued stalemate: the agreement of a lasting ceasefire or true between Ukraine and Russia was given a 38 per cent likelihood, and a significant Russian military breakthrough a 31 per cent chance. The chance of China launching a blockade of Taiwan was rated 38 per cent – up on the 27 per cent likelihood ascribed to the event in 2025.
In lighter news – and to give England fans a bit of hope – the chance of the Three Lions winning the World Cup was rated at 19 per cent.
Mansfield is quick to point out that the Wisdom of the Crowd is far from “infallible”. It can miss “black swans” – high impact events that come as a surprise at the time but which in retrospect are often rationalised as inevitable.
The biggest miss in last year’s competition was that the Conservatives would win the Canadian election (the Wisdom of the Crowd did not spot Trump resuscitating the Liberals under Mark Carney).
But perhaps there is a better predictor than the Wisdom of the Crowd – what about that small group of people who consistently outperform it?
The Dungeons and Dragons fan who beats the political pundits
Last year, the competition was not won by any of those who worked in politics, but by a Transport for London worker and former missionary, Christopher Flint.
Flint, a Dungeon and Dragons enthusiast who in his day job is the station area manager responsible for Marble Arch and Lancaster Gate tube stations, is modest about his achievement.
“Until I came first in this, I never thought I was a natural predictor,” he tells The i Paper. “Maybe I’m not, maybe it’s just luck.”
But the performance does not seem to be a fluke. In the three years the competition has been running, Flint has come first, sixth and sixth, consistently beating the Wisdom of the Crowd.
He has an active interest in current affairs, but is by no means a political obsessive. “I like to follow the news,” he said. “I read the BBC website every morning, mostly to look at the view of the newspapers, which I guess gives me a relatively rounded view.”
Flint thinks that not being inside the Westminster bubble has probably helped. “I think having a distance could be good,” he says. “That can bias you… because you’re more likely to be influenced by the voices there [in Westminster], rather than having a more zoomed out view.”
Christopher FlintWhat Flint does have is an excellent grasp of maths – he has a first-class physics degree from Oxford. This has no doubt helped him with estimating probabilities, identifying trends and making sensible predictions (the mathematical formula behind the game punishes people who make overconfident predictions which end up being wrong).
So what has Flint predicted for 2026? Strikingly, he is much more bearish than the Wisdom of the Crowd when it comes to Starmer’s chance of remaining Prime Minister, rating it at just 35 per cent (he is broadly the same as the crowd when it comes to Badenoch, giving her a 65 per cent chance of remaining Tory leader).
He also thinks there is an 80 per cent chance that the Greens will be ahead of Labour in the polls by the end of the year and a 70 per cent chance that the Liberal Democrats will be in front of them too.
He rates Reform’s chance of winning the most seats in the locals and the chance of Labour losing half their seats as 80 per cent in both cases.
He also thinks there is a 65 per cent chance there could be a stock market crash in which an AI bubble is seen as a major causal factor.Explaining how he reached his conclusion on Starmer’s chances, Flint said: “My reasoning is, we’re expecting Labour to do very, very badly in May. And we know that Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are ready to pounce and maybe Andy Burnham, so I thought this could be all over for him after May.
“Now we’ve got all these other things happening [the Mandelson scandal], maybe he’s going to go a bit sooner.
“I’m happy with 35 per cent for that one.”
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