Will Corbyn win a seat at the next general election?

What are the chances of Jeremy Corbyn remaining an MP after the next general election?

About 50/50 according to the early odds on the Smarkets exchange. Despite sitting on a huge 26,188 vote majority in Islington North, it seems quite unlikely he'll be the Labour candidate next time around. He had the whip removed back in October 2020 and an attempt to restore it was knocked back by the NEC last month. There doesn't seem to be much sign that he'll issue the apologies demanded by the Labour leadership, and so his most likely route to staying in Westminster would be to stand as an independent.

In general, the record of sitting MPs leaving their parties and attempting to defend seats as independents is not an encouraging one for Corbyn. In 2019 several high profile names tried and none of them came very close. David Gauke, Dominic Grieve and Frank Field were all thought to have decent personal votes, but that turned out not to be enough. Could Corbyn do any better as an independent, or perhaps under the banner of a new party? He certainly has a huge personal following, but would that be enough to win without the organisational might of the local Labour party behind him? I'd guess if anyone could pull it off, it might be him.

Maybe the best comparison is with Ken Livingstone's victory in the 2000 London Mayoral election. Livingstone stood as an independent and managed to easily defeat the official Labour candidate after having been narrowly edged out in the selection process (despite having won a majority of the votes of Labour members in that particular electoral college).

Still, this all presupposes that Corbyn would even want to run against Labour. My guess would be that he'd give it a go as he seems to enjoy being a backbench MP and can likely do a lot more for the causes he supports whilst he remains one. One other consideration - if he stands and loses he'll be entitled to a loss of office payment (likely to be over £30,000) which he wouldn't get if he doesn't contest a seat.

Boundary changes shouldn't matter very much here as the proposed new make up of Islington North only involves swapping a couple of wards with neighbouring constituencies. All in all, I think I'd rather be on YES winning this market.