What the betting scandal says about the Tories
Sir Philip Davies has been a Tory MP for nearly 20 years. He’s fighting to save a 6,242 majority in the face of a Labour onslaught on July 4. Esther McVey, his wife, attends Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio. She is informally known as the minister for common sense.
In the run-up to the general election, Davies placed a n £8 ,000 bet that he would lose his seat. He told the Su n , which broke the story, somewhat tetchily, that he did not dispute the sum involved, but that it was “nobody’s business”. Nor is it illegal, he added .
Maybe not. But the image of an elected representative of the British legislature asking for his constituents’ support, while secretly profiting from the likelihood that they will vote him out, feels like a peculiar kind of betrayal.
Playing both sides hardly does it justice. Davies says he did the same in 2005, betting he would lose. “I had a bet on myself to lose in the 2005 election,” said Davies. “I won and my bet went down the pan.”
What was he thinking? That democracy is a game, like football or boxing or horse racing? Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all. Perhaps his view is that the world, or at any rate his world, is a market where everything is for sale and everything has its price. Can’t he see what’s wrong with that?
I’m reminded of the Mad Hatter , who tells Alice: “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.”
For the record: footballers, boxers or jockeys are strictly forbidden by their sporting bodies from voting on their sport anywhere in the world. Jockeys cannot even “associate or communicate directly or indirectly” with bookies.
Davies is not alone . A slew of other MPs, election candidates (including one Labour), officials and police officers are under investigation by the Gambling Commission and the Met for what could amount to a form of insider trading.
Craig Williams, one of Sunak’s closest aides, bet on the date of the election three days before it was announced. He has been disowned as a candidate, along with Laura Saunders another Tory candidate. She is married to Tony Lee, the party’s head of campaigning, who is on gardening leave, as is Nick Mason, head of Tory HQ’s data department.
Seven police officers, including those on close protection duty assigned to Prime Minister Sunak, are also being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, which is working with the Gambling Commission.
Most will be investigated by the Gambling Commission, which will try and establish if the alleged bets breached Section 42 of the Gambling Act 2005. However, the Met is now suggesting that some could face a criminal investigation for the more serious offence of misconduct in public office. Nobody has so far been charged with any offence.
Were all of them or any of them in on the secret of the July surprise? Were they, in effect, all insider trading? Sunak is not saying. But by dumping Williams and Saunders, Sunak is desperately hoping to draw a line under the gambling scandal.
How much the story is playing outside the political bubble and social media is hard to say. At this stage of the game, probably not much. This may be partly because voters have had their fill of a party in freefall mired in a succession of scandals: Partygate; juicy PPE contracts handed to mates via an “exclusive” channel; David Cameron’s questionable relationship with financier Lex Greensill, whose company went bust owing billions; cash for questions, and so on.
But there’s something particularly tawdry about this one. Michael Gove says the betting scandal reinforces “the perception that we operate outside the rules that we set for others”. Well yes, but that’s hardly news. Remember Dominic Cummings’ Barnard Castle eye test?
Simon Kuper’s Chums , a first-rate account of how a small group of Tories who were together at Oxford captured the party, illustrates how entitlement is in-bred and how, when all is said and done, politicians of a certain temperament see the life-and-death business of governing as a game.
When empires crumble, people behave in strange but often predictable ways: in the last days before the fall of Saigon South Vietnamese soldiers tore off their uniforms before looting anything they could carry.
The Tory party has fallen very low. It’s project, begun by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, has run its course. Divided, dispirited and heading for a future that is barely discernible, it’s running for its life and taking what it can with it.
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