British horse racing’s debt to the Middle East

A joyful Saturday at Ascot recently reminded me that when the old Hurst Park Racecourse (near Hampton Court Palace) closed to become a Wates housing estate, the turf was taken to Ascot to form the basis of the jumping track then being established there. It was living beside Hurst Park — where the seven-furlong start abutted the Thameside Upper Deck swimming pool and jockeys focused on bikini-clad local lovelies sometimes missed the off — that turned me in my boyhood into a racing enthusiast, standing on the saddle of my bike perched against the boundary fence to watch the horses flash by or goggling at Prince Monolulu in his headdress flogging tips outside the front gate.

In those days politicians shared the nation’s punting pleasures: the informal rule in the Conservative whips’ office, a former chief whip told me, was ‘light whipping in Ascot week, no votes on Derby Day and get the House up for the summer recess in time for Glorious Goodwood’. Winston Churchill, who bought his first horse, Colonist II, at the age of 75, had more than 30 over several years in training with Walter Nightingall in Epsom and it was at Hurst Park in May 1951 that the then Queen Elizabeth invited the statesman to lunch before his gutsy grey beat her father’s Above Board in the Winston Churchill Stakes. Racing gave him great pleasure in his later years, though when told that an injury at Goodwood necessitated Colonist’s retirement to stud, Churchill was initially reluctant: ‘To stud? And have it said that the Prime Minister of England is living on the immoral earnings of a horse?’

Sadly no MPs today own horses. Few Parliamentarians would know a two-year-old sprinter from a Cheltenham Gold Cup winner and the constant churning of ministers through the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport ensures that there is no one in government whose oversight of the sport lasts long enough to give them the slightest grasp of racing’s problems, like the urgent need for Levy reform.