Poor old Rishi Sunak. You would have to have the proverbial heart of stone not to feel, at least, a bat-squeak of pity for the man at this stage. First there was that poignant press conference in the rain, then the D-day kerfuffle, the flock of sheep in Devon who snubbed him when he tried to feed them, the series of ill-advised visits to chocolate teapot factories and pubs called things like ‘The Last Chance Saloon’, and now this…
It’s not a huge amount to take in exchange for humiliating your colleagues and trashing your party’s chance of winning an election
You can imagine his bewilderment, his despairing incredulity, as he discovered that the headlines for the last week of his campaign were to be dominated not by the good news about inflation but by the slow-burning story of one, two, three, four (and possibly more) of his people being accused of taking out hooky bets on the election date. His soon-to-be-former colleague Michael Gove, some will think unhelpfully, compared the scandal to partygate.
Craig Williams, the PM’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, stands accused of placing a bet on the election date just three days before it was announced; the party’s director of campaigning and his Conservative candidate wife are also under investigation; and now it emerges that the party’s data chief is also accused of placing multiple bets on the election date which (very data chief-ish detail, this) were all reportedly under £100 but could add up to thousands of pounds in winnings. (He has denied any wrongdoing.)
Meanwhile, we hear, a ‘second wave’ of questionable punters – said to be associates and contacts of those in the first wave – are to be investigated next. Hem-hemming on Sky News, James Cleverly made the weak defence that it was ‘a small number of individuals’, and couldn’t even go further than saying there was ‘no reason to believe’ any cabinet ministers had placed bets that were going to look bad. Not exactly the words of a man confident in the integrity of his colleagues.
It’s not just that these bets have about them the stink of corruption. It’s that – and as a half-billionaire Rishi Sunak will feel this especially keenly – the amounts of money that the alleged cheaty bettors stand to gain are so comparatively trivial. The Gambling Commission’s investigation into irregular gambling on the election results is looking into anyone who stood to gain more than £199 for a win. It’s not a huge amount to take in exchange for humiliating your colleagues and trashing your party’s chance of winning an election.
Or helping trash. Or – let’s be realistic – making no great difference at all. Maybe that’s the heart of it. Deciding, perhaps, that the die is cast and that whatever they now do the Conservative and Unionist party is about to be ground zero at the political equivalent of the asteroid-strike that did for the dinosaurs, and with much the same result, they thought that they might as well go down to the bookies and make the price of a decent lunch at the Carlton Club. This is, if nothing else, true in its perverse way to the cherished Conservative principles of market-incentivised individualism.
We are, this seems to indicate, in the sauve qui peut (every man for himself) phase of this election. Michael Gove – one of the tiny handful of principled intellectuals still in a senior position in a party which, until relatively recently in its history, has had a place at the top for principled intellectuals – was right to compare this scandal to partygate. The venal selfishness we see apparently on show now is cousin to the venal selfishness that got us to this position. There was a terrible human smallness – the clinking wine bottles, the shabby cover-ups, the squabbles on WhatsApp, the VIP lane pocket-stuffing, and all the rest of it – to the scandals that wrecked the party’s reputation, and there’s a terrible human smallness to the scandal now.
If you’re someone with senior responsibility for the electoral fortunes of a centuries-old political party, even if those fortunes look to be terminally on the slide, it’s a bad show to sell it out for a fistful of betting slips. It’s like going through the pockets of the dead on a battlefield. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, sure: but these people (if they are found to have done what they are accused of doing) seem to be willing to be hanged for a dormouse.
That’s none of Rishi Sunak’s doing. He may be playing his hand woefully, but he doesn’t have much of a hand to play and he’s not a crook. We can believe him when he says he’s cross. ‘If anyone is found to have broken the rules, not only should they face the full consequences of the law,’ he told a Question Time audience, ‘I will make sure that they are booted out of the Conservative party.’
You might think, mind you, that if someone’s facing the prospect of going to jail (cheating at gaming carries a maximum sentence of 51 weeks), they won’t give too much of a hoot about having their Tory membership revoked on top of that. But at this point Mr Sunak doesn’t have much in the way of further sanctions open to him. That, too, seems to me to be part of the issue: power is draining out of this government in an arterial gush.
If you’re not the sort of person for whom self-respect, or respect for the party with which you’re affiliated and its traditions, or basic moral principle have any real sway, you’re left with a cold calculation of interest. We’re seeing now that a) there look to be a dismaying number of such people in positions of trust at the top of the Conservative party; and that b) the calculation of interest they are making is that there’s nothing parliamentary Conservatism can now offer them that’s worth more than a few hundred quid from Ladbrokes.
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