Shall we make this interesting? You must be hoping I will. So, come on, let’s spice things up, introduce a bit of financial jeopardy. What do you bet I’m writing about and how much will you stake? You may have trouble getting a bookmaker to take the bet, of course, because they may not believe you hadn’t read beyond this paragraph, however fervently you promise it and point to how unfinishable my columns tend to be. They may still suspect you had the “inside information” that comes from having somehow slogged through to the end. A betting market can’t really exist about this sort of thing unless columns were published paragraph by paragraph over several hours, and even then you’d have desperate Observer editorial staff trying to supplement their salaries by placing spread bets on how many times this week’s Andrew Rawnsley piece uses the word “strategist”.
It’s the election, of course! Would you have made money? I don’t think you’d have been given great odds, even if you’d managed to get anything on. I’m talking about the election and how loads of people suddenly seem to be betting on it. Why this flurry of flutters? Well, to make it interesting, I suppose. Without money riding on it, they fear the campaign may struggle to hold their attention. That’s a bit of a red flag about political apathy, particularly as many of the people I’m talking about are parliamentary candidates.
Has politics been reduced to the level of horse racing? Don’t get me wrong, horse racing is a majestic sport. The sight of neurotic horse and diminutive human in perfect symbiosis is an impressive one. But there’s no getting away from the fact that nobody takes an interest in which horse wins unless they’ve got money riding on it as well as a tiny Irishman. There’s no one who just supports “Cardigan Marino” or “Good Old Spendthrift” or “Spagaloo” and turns up to pay to watch that horse purely in the hope of its victory, like they do with Liverpool or Roger Federer. Every sport attracts gamblers but the sport of kings doesn’t attract anyone else, and I’m including the kings. If the government banned betting, it would swiftly lead to a mysterious glut of frozen lasagne in the global market.
The fact is that all this betting has indeed made the election more interesting – for everyone. The flutterers themselves are enduring the sort of “interesting times” referred to in the apocryphal Chinese curse by becoming the focus for public condemnation, and the rest of us have been diverted by the spectacle of yet another unfortunate thing happening to Rishi Sunak. He’s really nailing his new role of loser. It’s hard to credit how differently he used to come across, how slick he used to seem, back when he was Boris Johnson’s chancellor and releasing photographs of himself looking cool. He’s gone from David Niven to Norman Wisdom in less than two years.
The nature and scale of the betting that’s gone on is unclear but most of it seems to have been done by Tories – candidates and officials plus allegedly the secretary of state for Scotland, who claimed to have won £2,100 betting on a July election but now says he was joking. But Labour isn’t untainted: Kevin Craig, the Labour candidate for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, has been suspended for betting that his Tory opponent would win. I can understand why the Gambling Commission would investigate that, as Craig obviously has the opportunity to influence the result – to throw the fight – though my suspicion is his intention was still to try to win the seat and that the bet was to give himself a consolation prize, one which he says he intended to donate to charity. I suppose his nightmare would have been the Liberal Democrat winning.
Still, Craig admits to a “huge error of judgment”, precisely echoing the words of another Craig, Craig Williams, the prime minister’s former parliamentary private secretary, who is standing for re-election as MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr and was one of those who bet on the election’s timing. I rather like the phrase “huge error of judgment” – I’m glad it’s catching on. It sounds so portentous. It conjures up the image of these bets being placed with such thoughtful solemnity but then followed by an immediate face-palm: “Oh no! Not another huge error of judgment!”
I’m not sure judgment really has much to do with this, except for the haughty and humourless judgment that leading politicians and the media have brought down on these poor bozos. You’d think they’d bared their arses at the queen. (“I do apologise, your majesty, that was a huge error of judgment.”) And who are the victims of these now humiliated small-timers’ opportunistic flutters? The bookmakers. I know quite a few gamblers through my wife, who is a poker player, and they would caution against us wasting much sympathy.
Bookmakers don’t mind fooling people but they don’t like to be fooled and this aversion to a level playing field appears to have been enshrined in the 2005 Gambling Act. The odds are always stacked in the bookmakers’ favour and, when they’re not, that’s cheating. My wife’s friends would tell you that, if a bookie spots anyone regularly winning, even through blameless insight into equine behaviour, they’ll stop taking their bets or only take tiny ones. So when someone walks in and says they reckon they know when the election will be, the bookmakers happily take their money – but if it turns out they were right and did know when the election will be, suddenly it’s against the law.
I understand that if you bet on something you then fix, that you can manipulate, that’s fraud. But if you know something, or are well informed and expect it, surely the bookmakers’ defence is to smell a rat and not take the bet.
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Otherwise, what are they saying: that it’s only a fair bet if you probably lose? Should punters have to sign an affidavit saying: “I may have bet that Hopalong Strawberry will win the Gold Cup but I swear I have no reasonable expectation that that will happen and only think it for muddle-headed superstitious reasons of my own”? There’s nothing interesting about that.
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