At least four senior Conservative Party insiders are facing allegations of placing financial bets on a July general election shortly before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s surprise announcement of the election date.
A large number of bets were placed just before the announcement late last month, prompting bookmakers to alert the Gambling Commission—the UK’s betting regulator—to potentially suspicious activity.
The four figures currently embroiled in the scandal are Tory electoral candidates Craig Williams and Laura Saunders; Saunders’ husband—and Tory campaign director—Tony Lee; and an unnamed police officer from Sunak’s protection unit.
What laws could have been broken?
Betting on political events is permitted in the UK, although betting using inside information is potentially a breach of Section 42 of the Gambling Act, which covers “cheating.” This offence carries a penalty of up to two years in prison and a fine.
The Financial Times reports that “the main legal precedent on the issue—a 2017 case involving a gambler who arranged for cards at a London casino to be shuffled in a certain way—is that it does not matter if people did not intend to cheat, but only if they appear to have cheated.”
But a barrister also told the paper that there is “a lot of debate” about what “cheating” actually means.
The Commission has not revealed how many people it is investigating, nor how much some of those involved in the scandal are understood to have put down (though we do know that Williams bet £100 at 5/1).
In an attempt to contain the issue, Sunak has stressed how “incredibly angry” he is about senior Tories betting on the date of the election and has insisted that those found to have broken the rules should “face the full force of the law.”
But like all the scandals that have come before it (most notably then-PM Boris Johnson breaking his own lockdown rules in ‘Partygate’), this was quickly politicised. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage branded the Tories “even more corrupt than we knew,” adding: “They are stealing the light bulbs on the way out of the building.”
Whatever the legal conclusion of this scandal, Farage added that the Tories have the “stink of corruption” about them and are “morally bankrupt.”
Tom Harris, a columnist at The Daily Telegraph, also wrote that “for yet another generation, Conservative government will be synonymous with corruption and venality.”
The sums involved may be small but the reputational damage to the Government as a whole, to the Tory party and to Sunak personally will be colossal. And it should be. These people seem to look down on us—all the evidence for that conclusion lies in their behaviour. And as we know, when someone tells us who they are, believe them.
Tory insiders are no more pleased by the whole affair, which reached peak silliness when the party’s Twitter page deleted a post warning voters—above an image of a roulette wheel—that “if you bet on Labour, you can never win”…
With their campaign chief taking a leave of absence amid the row, one Conservative HQ source told the Express that matters had got “out of control.”
If previous Tory scandals are anything to go by, there is room for this to get a whole lot worse.
