The inside-betting scandal wracking CCHQ has been a spectacular own-goal for the Conservatives. Just at the very point when the campaign ought to have been getting slightly easier for them automatically (as press attention naturally shifted towards Labour, still 20 points ahead), it has kept the spotlight on the party in a deeply unhelpful way.
Rishi Sunak, whilst not personally implicated in any allegation of using his knowledge of the election date to place bets, has signally failed to get ahead of the story, only suspending the two candidates currently known to be under investigation yesterday.
No such hesitation from ruthless Sir Keir Starmer, who acted immediately when it emerged that a Labour candidate had bet on their own result:
“Kevin Craig, Labour’s Central Suffolk and North Ipswich candidate, was “administratively” suspended after Labour was told by the Gambling Commission that an investigation had been launched into one of the party’s candidates.
“Apologising for what he described as a “huge mistake”, Craig admitted in a statement that he had placed a bet against himself winning the seat a few weeks ago.”
Politically, a swift suspension was the smart choice; Starmer can always re-admit Craig in the event that he a) wins his seat and b) is cleared by the Gambling Commission.
But does it risk setting a deeply unhelpful precedent? Robert Peston suggests that “it is widely believed that betting by candidates on themselves is rife”, and that should the Gambling Commission choose to go down this rabbit hole it could lead to dozens of investigations.
Fair enough, you might think. Yet any fair-minded observer must at this point concede that there is a huge difference between the original allegations – people using inside information to cheat the bookmakers – and what Kevin Craig admits to doing, which is simply placing a bet against himself winning what ought (emphasis, at this point, on ought) to be a rock-solid Tory seat.
Yes, on the face of it there is something a bit off about someone betting against themselves. But again, in this particular case the idea of foul play doesn’t stand up to thirty seconds’ critical scrutiny. Were it a close race, and had Craig placed a big bet, there might be grounds for suspicion that he might try and throw it. Neither of those things apply.
Unfortunately, however, the Craig story is just what this story needed to start metastasizing from a serious scandal into a stupid moral panic.
The Conservatives naturally have every interest in playing it up for all its worth, trying to zoom the conversation out from the specifics into po-faced meditations about the political class in general. For this, they have a ready audience amongst the British public, which has seldom passed over an opportunity for a bit of knee-jerk puritanism, and the press, which has a bottomless appetite for demands that “Something must be done!” about whatever the scandal du jour happens to be.
Thus, suggestions this morning from Mel Stride that perhaps MPs should be banned from betting altogether, a suggestion that would have looked absurd two weeks ago and is still absurd now. Any comparison with sport is spurious – there is no evidence that politicians are deliberately trying to lose races to win bets, and no even theoretical misalignment of incentives if they bet on themselves to win.
Meanwhile inside betting, which is what the Conservatives being investigated by the Gambling Commission are alleged to have done, is already illegal. Craig’s suspension, on the other hand, is a press management decision; had Starmer first learned of his bet a month ago, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
Any new regime of regulation for political betting will also just be a press-management strategy, designed to make this story go away by assuring the newspapers that something has been done. It would freight our politics with a pointless length of red tape (or even, God help us, another regulator that needs to justify their own existence), in order to tackle a non-existent problem.
So I leave both sides with the wise words of the Better Regulation Task Force, founded in 2005 by Tony Blair, which in Principles of Good Regulation advised ministers not to “automatically assume prescriptive regulation is required”. The first alternative is:
Do nothing
Government consistently faces demands from interest groups and the media to take action, often in response to one-off incidents or tragedies. In many cases the most appropriate response is to do nothing, as government action may be unnecessary, or worse, have costly unintended consequences.