Why I’m glad there’s no British Las Vegas

I didn’t realise that the Rialto Bridge has a moving walkway and muzak, that the gondolas beneath it float on a clear blue pool, and that the school of Tiepolo had so many apprentices available to paint hotel ceilings. ‘Still in Venice, Martin?’ you’re thinking. ‘Surely that was last month?’ Well no, your intrepid columnist has moved from the old world to the new, and reports this week from the desert frontier where unfettered capitalism meets the lowest human urges: Las Vegas. It’s an overwhelming experience, so forgive me if my grip on what’s happening at home — reactions to David Cameron’s CBI conference speech, for example, and the rejected Qatari bid for Canary Wharf — is a little hazy. I’ve just spent a long weekend on another planet.

I’m here to discuss ‘Money: Winners and Losers’, which in a sense is what I do here every week. But in Vegas there’s no point in addressing the topic in the abstract, in a conference suite: better to walk the cavernous casinos and glittering concourses that draw 40 million visitors a year, 400,000 from the UK. Here, via the replica Rialto, is the Venetian hotel and its sister Palazzo, 8,000 suites and rooms between them; proprietor Sheldon Adelson is one of the world’s richest men, worth $30 billion, and a major funder of Republican candidates. Clearly he’s a winner — although his master company, Las Vegas Sands Corporation, paid $47 million to the US government last year to avoid possible criminal charges over alleged money-laundering activities involving a high-stakes Chinese gambler at the Venetian.

But are all gamblers losers, ruthlessly exploited? Not quite all, of course. One of our conference participants, a serious card player at home, finds himself several thousand dollars to the good on the first evening, having survived a stewards’ inquiry into his ‘perfect’ blackjack play; but by the third night his luck has reversed, and for want of the taxi fare he’s had to trudge back from the Strip to our hotel, the Palms, via the less glamorous walkways where the vagrants live.