Alleged betting scandal mirrors the Tories’ political favours of the pandemic

25 June 2024, 14:13 | Updated: 25 June 2024, 15:12

If you like a bet every now and then you’ll have acted on inside information. Maybe your boss tells you he expects his horse to do well at Lingfield Park this evening.

Or your sister’s friend is dating one of the stablehands and she tells you there’s quite the buzz around a colt at the yard where he works. If you then made a special trip to Ladbrokes would you think you’d done anything wrong? Or would you rub your hands together at the thought of, at last, getting one over your plump local bookmaker?

I’d wager the latter. And so did the Conservative Parliamentary candidates and party officials who, having pocketed their small wads of greasy scores after ‘guessing’ the General Election would be in July, now find themselves the unlikely headliners of a campaign that, let’s be honest, most of us just want to be over.

So why are we so angry about it - and what is that they did wrong?

Remember back to March 2020 - the full terror of the pandemic - when every news bulletin was dominated with stories of how doctors and nurses were tending patients with a mysterious, and often deadly, new disease. And we were asking them to do it without proper protective equipment - so they were working in Marigold gloves and ski masks.

It should have been a moment when we pulled together as a nation. What happened instead, as Good Law Project has revealed, was that well-connected spivs with political connections saw a one way bet. ‘They are killing us in the polls, these stories,’ Tory MPs and Ministers complained ‘why is there no PPE when I have friends who can get you everything you need?’

And the rest is history.

But it’s one story for us sops. We will spend the rest of our lives paying higher taxes because Ministers went on a shopping spree with their VIP pals.

The National Audit Office says we bought £12.5bn of PPE: five years supply at five times the normal price. Even the Department of Health admits £10bn of PPE was written off - but the real number will be far higher. We spent well over a billion pounds storing the stuff - often in China because we bought so much we had nowhere to put it - and to rub salt into the wound we now have to pay for it to be trashed. Some of the same VIPs we bought it from we paid again to store it and for a third time to destroy it.

And it’s another story for the VIPs. If you had the inside information - if you were a friend of, or the advisor to, or the lover of, or a publican for a Tory politician - you had a chance to place an enormous bet, one that couldn’t lose. Innova, on the test and trace VIP lane, made a reported £1.6bn in profit after sending  a short unsolicited email to “Dominic” at Number 10.

They sailed away on their yachts, shot grouse in their new estates, or jetted around the world on their private planes. All bought with our money.

What lessons do you learn if you’re a young would-be Tory MP like Laura Saunders, married to the Tory Director of Campaigns Tony Lee, or Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr candidate Craig Williams? There’s no real accountability - not for those VIPs who made hundreds of millions. Why not relieve your bookie of a few hundred quid?

You know it’s wrong, trading on inside information - but everyone else is doing it. So why not you?

Jo Maugham KC is Founder and Director of Good Law Project - and the author of Bringing Down Goliath, the Sunday Times Bestseller about the PPE debacle.