LOCAL betting shops, like betting shops up and down the country, are running books on the General Election.

I only wish there were some more interesting bets than the usual ones about who’ll win.

With the latest polls showing no single party as a shoo-in, at current odds you’d have to stake about 50 quid to win a fiver.

If the betting shops want to draw in some extra punters ahead of the election, they need to come up with something a bit off the beaten track.

Something else they need to come up with, incidentally, is a special area of the betting shop set aside for members of the public who haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing, just like there should be on Grand National day.

That way, we wouldn’t annoy the proper betters who confidently stroll up to the counter and ask for things like each-way accumulators, Yankees, Heinzes, Quintuple Axolotls and whatnot.

But I digress.

Rather than their giving us odds on who’ll win what and where, I’d like to be able to bet on other stuff.

For example, there could be odds on at least one candidate somewhere in the country claiming to have spoken to a potential constituent who’s obviously a figment of their imagination. The fictional person might be anybody from a retired toad-wrangler who lives in a tree to a dad-of-nine who’s retraining to be a rowing boat, but the point is that they must be invoked in order to win a few votes.

We should have the opportunity to bet on a candidate being revealed as a heavy duty adulterer some time before the poll. For a bonus side-bet, we could win extra cash if it turns out that their two or three partners and families didn't know of the others’ existences because they’re in different countries.

Another thing I’d bet on is at least one candidate turning out to be a rabidly enthusiastic practitioner of certain alarming erotic practices. These practices may or may not involve rhubarb, blancmange, self-assembly furniture, a stuffed badger and some carefully-catalogued clippings from the Pig Breeders’ Gazette.

There’d be bonus odds if the candidate has previously condemned such activities as being against nature.

There’d be an even bigger bonus if they subsequently arranged a damage-limitation photo-shoot with a spouse or partner whose thousand-yard stare was silent testament to unimaginable horrors witnessed. Or who looked a bit like a badger.

Betting shops should also offer odds on a candidate being caught saying something so offensive, so absolutely outrageous, that no decent human being would ever consider thinking such a thing, let alone giving voice to it. They might, for example, pass on an obscene joke about a deceased celebrity, quote approvingly from a speech by Hitler or Stalin, or call for anybody they disapprove of to be fed into great big meat grinders.

The bonus side bet this time would come into play if the candidate insisted their words had been taken out of context, even if what they said was recorded and in its entirety or personally engraved by them on a granite slab and signed with a flourish.