In the dying days of Donald Trump’s presidency, the log fire in his chief of staff’s office was lit daily.
The outgoing team were frantically burning documents, or so the White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson writes in her memoir, to the point that her own boss’s wife reportedly complained that his suits smelled of smoke. Many alarming things happened in those final days, but the fall-of-Rome atmosphere is somehow captured in that whiff of bonfire. The paranoia; the panic; the queasy feeling of something very wrong at the heart of public life.
How a regime behaves as it crumbles is as revealing as how it behaves at the height of its powers, and that’s what makes the betting allegations now engulfing the Conservative party – which even by the standards of this surreal election have a “what the hell?” quality – so damning. Whose first instinct, as the end neared, would be to make a quick buck on the way out?
We don’t yet know exactly what happened, of course, in those last few days before Rishi Sunak sprang his snap election on the nation. All we can say for sure is that the Gambling Commission is investigating bets allegedly placed on a July date and that five people have been identified as part of the watchdog’s inquiries so far, including the prime minister’s parliamentary bag carrier (and then MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr), Craig Williams; the Conservative party’s director of campaigns, Tony Lee, and his wife, Laura Saunders, the latter a candidate in Bristol North West; plus the party’s chief data officer, Nick Mason. Further investigations are said to be ongoing and rumours are flying about who might be involved.
The law here is complicated, trying to draw a sometimes fuzzy line between legally gambling while in the know – like a racing punter who spends hours studying the form, or even a stablehand having a flutter – and actively cheating by employing specific confidential information to gain unfair advantage, which is potentially an offence. The accused deny wrongdoing, and it’s still unclear which side of the law these alleged Tory bets fall. But it’s the scale of this investigation, plus its timing just as Nigel Farage was helpfully making his first serious misstep of the campaign over Ukraine, that is so damaging to Sunak.
As with Partygate, it’s not one isolated allegation but a string of them, raising questions about a culture that the squeaky-clean Sunak was specifically chosen to clean up. Once again, it reinforces both “the perception that we operate outside the rules that we set for others”, as Michael Gove put it, and the sense that politics is just a game to elites. But it’s the small-mindedness of this scandal, together with the suggestion of profit, that makes it particularly tawdry.
The winnings on a £100 stake wouldn’t have been life-changing sums of money for well-paid professionals – nowhere near as rewarding as, for example, a juicy PPE contract heading the way of a Tory donor, or the kind of lobbying contract that more than doubles an MP’s parliamentary salary. But somehow that makes it almost worse. It’s on a par with raiding the office stationery cupboard after being sacked, and stupidly getting caught on the way out. Was it really worth it, for a lifetime’s supply of ballpoint pens? Irony of ironies, unusual spikes in the political betting market may even have given Labour early warning of a pending announcement.
The electoral fallout from all this looks surprisingly limited, if only because it’s hard to see how much further the Conservative vote could realistically fall from here. Already the campaign seems to have given up on all but the once ultra-safe seats Sunak has retreated to defend, including, astonishingly, his own. But it does hammer the chances of the Tories recovering any ground as Farage’s views come under more serious scrutiny, while the volunteers so crucial to fighting the final few days of this election will only be further demoralised.
This has been a tough year to be a Tory canvasser, an unpaid foot soldier berated on every doorstep for things you can’t even begin to defend, from the Liz Truss budget to Sunak scarpering early from D-day commemorations. Now despondent candidates and their depleted army of volunteers, many of them astonished at their leader’s flat-footed refusal to suspend those under investigation, have a new millstone around their necks. How motivated will they be to traipse from door to door, apologising for mistakes made over their heads by people paid enough to know better, while their director of campaigns takes leave from his own campaign?
Some on the right want to minimise these latest allegations, arguing that betting on politics has always been rife at Westminster. Well, maybe I’m the naive one, but there were times in my old job as a lobby reporter when I had inside knowledge and it never once even occurred to me to hotfoot it to William Hill – though presumably there would have been good odds to be had on a minister resigning, for anyone placing a bet before publishing the story likely to push them into it.
For those who enjoyed the occasional flutter – and I can think of one Liberal Democrat electoral strategist famous for betting on byelections – it was often less about the money than publicly backing their own hunches.
In retrospect, reports of hedge funders using private polling to short the pound on the night of the Brexit referendum should have been a warning that times had changed. But the idea of betting within the prime minister’s circle of trust remains, and should be, shocking.
All this may seem a dream come true for Keir Starmer, whose path to a landslide has never looked clearer. Yet it comes with a warning. Sleaze scandals reinforce the idea that politicians are just in it for themselves, and those who believe that’s true tend to think it’s true of everyone, not just one party. It will take more than Starmer’s promised new ethics and integrity commission to rebuild the trust shattered by years of ministers behaving badly with seeming impunity. There will doubtless be scandals to come in Starmer’s own ranks – all governments have them – and he will be defined by how he handles the first.
But for now, the betting allegations are one more reason for furious voters to cry “enough”. They’re done with a Conservative administration that seems ideologically and morally exhausted: and whether or not they’re convinced Labour will do better, they reckon it can’t be worse. The bookies’ odds on a historic Labour victory have, in other words, shortened again – or at least they have, so long as nobody around the leader bets on it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
-
Guardian Newsroom: election results special. On Friday 5 July, 7.30pm-9pm BST, join Hugh Muir, Gaby Hinsliff, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams for unrivalled analysis of the general election results.
Book tickets here or at theguardian.live
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
