Rishi Sunak’s bet was significant. Five weeks ago, the British prime minister bet the House on his belief that a summer election could give his Conservative Party a better chance of retaining power than waiting until the autumn.
Calling a snap election served as Mr. Sunak’s last throw of the dice. But since then, it turned out that in the days before he stood sullenly in the rain on May 22 and told the country he was going to the polls, several colleagues and subjects were placing bets of the most literal kind.
Looking at data from the week before Mr Sunak’s announcement, bookies saw a sharp increase in bets placed on the election date. The sums at stake were small—just a few thousand pounds in total—but the sudden frenzy was enough to warrant further investigation.
The question of whether these bets were being made by political officials, using insider knowledge of Mr Sunak’s intentions for a quick profit, has dominated the last few days of the Conservative government. It also includes how some sections of the electorate perceive the party that has ruled Britain for 14 years.
“The whole thing reinforced earlier public concerns,” said Luke Tryl, executive director of More in Common, a research group. “It gets right to the heart of it: ‘One rule for them and one rule for everyone else.’
Craig Williams, one of Mr Sunak’s key parliamentary aides and Conservative candidate for office, was the first to come under scrutiny after The Guardian published that he had bet on a July election on May 19, three days before from the prime minister’s office. announcement. Now suspended from the campaign, he has admitted he made an “error of judgement” but insisted he had committed no criminal offence.
As the Gambling Commission, the regulator that oversees Britain’s rich and varied betting industry, widens its probe, a number of other senior Tory figures have been named as under investigation.
They included Tony Lee, the party’s campaign manager, and his wife, Laura Sanders, a Conservative candidate in the upcoming election who has since been suspended from the party.
Nick Mason, the Conservative data director, has been put on leave after being told he too is under investigation. Rumors are swirling that a number of other conservative figures may soon be identified by the investigation.
One of the officers protecting Mr Sunak, meanwhile, was arrested on allegations he had also bet on the timing of the election, and the Metropolitan Police confirmed it was investigating a number of other law enforcement officials.
The scandal is another blow to Mr. Sunak, who is campaigning less to win the election, scheduled for July 4, than to stem potential losses for his party.
He had already caused an uproar after pulling out of the 80th anniversary of D-Day celebrations early to give a television interview, a decision for which he later profusely apologised. He then faced widespread ridicule after claiming he had experienced hardship as a child because his parents wouldn’t allow him to have satellite TV.
Allegations of gambling have compounded that damage, polling experts said, adding to the sense of an unknown party that seemed to think itself above moral concerns.
What was potentially more corrosive was “the perception that we are operating outside the rules we have set for others,” Michael Gove, one of the high-profile Conservative lawmakers, told The Sunday Times. “This was damaging at the time of Partygate,” he said, referring to the scandal over lockdown-breaking parties held inside Boris Johnson’s Downing Street during the pandemic, “And here it is damaging.”
Political betting is a growing industry – more than $1.5 billion was wagered on the outcome of the 2020 United States presidential election, making it possibly the largest single gambling event of all time – but markets about when it might called elections are inherent, say niche insiders.
They function, essentially, as novelties, designed to attract publicity and hopefully new customers, according to a longtime political betting expert, who asked not to be named because of the industry’s sensitivity.
They are not designed, he said, to yield huge returns. The bookmakers simply aim not to lose money on them, working on the assumption that there will be people — not just lawmakers but various party mechanics — who will have access to better information than they do. To limit their losses, they limit the amount of money each can bet on the market.
Bets made in the days just before Mr Sunak’s announcement fit that bill. Mr Williams, for example, is accused of betting as little as £100 ($125), for winnings that would amount to only a few hundred pounds. “These are not life-changing amounts for senior politicians,” said Joe Twyman, director of Deltapoll, a public opinion consultancy.
Indeed, the small size of the market is what may have alerted authorities to unusual activity in the first place: The spike likely wouldn’t be seen in a market like horse racing or football.
Britain has a strange relationship with betting, perhaps best illustrated by its position in sport. In football, for example, as in baseball, players are completely prohibited from betting on their own sport.
Last year, England striker Ivan Toney was banned for six months for gambling on games. Lucas Paquetá, a Brazilian midfielder, could be banned for life if found guilty of gambling on games in which he participated. He categorically denied the accusations.
Both Mr. Toney and Mr. Paquetá, however, play for club teams — Brentford and West Ham, respectively — that were sponsored last season by gambling companies. They play on pitches plastered with betting shop logos. And Brentford owner Matthew Benham bought the club with money he made in his hugely successful career as a professional sports player.
This kind of cognitive dissonance around gambling is well known in Britain. If gambling takes place in one of the thousands of betting shops on the country’s high streets, it is seen as a social scourge, a disturbing and pernicious addiction.
If it’s at Royal Ascot and you wear a nice hat, it’s the social event of the season. It was telling that Mr Williams, the prime minister’s aide, described his bet as a “flutter” – a British euphemism for a small bet that is inherently trivial, harmless and fun.
The election scandal resonated with voters not because they disapprove of all gambling, experts said, but because of what it suggested about the ethics of the ruling party.
“It includes what everyone was already thinking,” Mr Twyman said. “It reinforces an existing narrative built around the historical issues from Partygate. And it has an opportunity cost: People are talking about it, instead of what the Conservatives want to talk about.”
The extent to which it has reached ordinary people is breathtaking, according to Mr Tryl of More in Common. His figures show that the betting scandal, along with Mr Sunak’s “blunders” around D-Day and his comments on cable TV, have become the defining issues of the campaign.
The allegations have not made much of a difference in the polls, but that should be little relief for the Conservatives, Mr Trill said, because it reflected not how little the public cared, but how much of the electorate had already turned against the party. of. “A lot of people had already gone,” he said.
This, of course, is the bookmakers’ view: The Conservatives are currently 70/1 to retain power on July 4.
