When Rishi Sunak’s aide Craig Williams admitted he’d placed a bet on the general election, most political observers thought it was a baffling lapse of individual judgment. Why would an MP risk their career for a £500 payout?
But as other political figures have been caught up in the same gambling investigation, the question has changed: does Westminster as a whole have a betting problem?
Five Conservatives are being investigated by the Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, for election bets. Labour has suspended a parliamentary candidate who bet on himself to lose his constituency. A cabinet minister, the Scottish secretary Alister Jack, has said that he placed three bets on the timing of the election, adding that he won only one of them and broke no rules.
“I do think it’s more common than we imagine,” said one MP.
Steve Donoughue, a gambling consultant, said: “I think it’s hugely widespread. If they said they’re going to suspend every candidate who placed a bet on this election, they would probably find half of them getting suspended.”
Rife political betting is not a new phenomenon. As recently as the 1990s, “there were betting shops in Victoria which were known by the bookmakers as the places where civil servants and MPs would place their inside bets,” said Donoughue. “The bookmakers appreciated that because it gave them the inside track.”
The risk is that, as with previous revelations over parliamentary expenses and drinking culture, what seems normal behaviour at Westminster becomes highly damaging when exposed publicly. Roughly half the UK’s adult population bets on sporting events — meaning the practice cuts through to a public normally indifferent to Westminster’s information-trading.
Any sense that MPs are treating politics as a game or a moneymaking opportunity could further anger British voters, who are already disillusioned with their elected politicians.
The UK was unusual in allowing bets on politics, said Anthony Pickles, assistant professor in social anthropology at the University of Birmingham. In contrast, continental Europe “is basically a desert of political gambling”. The US, meanwhile, has tight restrictions.
The election-betting affair in the UK encompasses two seemingly different types of cases: those where politicians may have had inside information, for example about the election date, and those where they did not.
But there is also a grey area. Inside information is hard to define, given the ever-swirling gossip at Westminster. And by betting on election races in which they are involved, candidates risk being accused of rigging the vote. In 1973, Clement Freud bet on himself in a by-election in Cambridgeshire; he won significant sums and the bets may have contributed to his momentum in taking the seat.
In 1994, Charles Kennedy, then Liberal Democrat president, boasted of winning £2,500 by correctly betting the party would only win two seats in the European elections.
Alan Clark, the former Conservative MP, wrote in his diaries of running a betting book and accepting a fellow MP’s £100 bet that Clark himself would be in the next Thatcher government. “He always knows everything, but I took the bet all the same.”
Before the 2016 Brexit referendum, Nigel Farage said he had bet £1,000 on the UK voting Leave, claiming: “The odds are moving in our favour.”
With so many types of cases now being probed, an important question is what forms of political betting are illegal.
While Section 42 of the 2005 Gambling Act makes it an offence to cheat, it has nothing to say about what constitutes cheating. In almost two decades, there has only been a single conviction under the act.
The Gambling Commission has powers to investigate and take action against the misuse of “inside information”. It defines inside information as things known “as a result of [an individual’s] connection with an event and which is not in the public domain”, and defines misuse as acting in a way that would be considered unfair or cheating.
For instance, someone betting with insight that they do not know is restricted would not be considered misuse. Examples include someone overhearing a comment in a pub, or from working in a hospital “where a player is being treated for an injury which has not yet been made public”.
Importantly, legal precedent suggests it does not matter whether gamblers themselves believe their actions are dishonest.
In 2017, in the only English legal case to have systematically examined the definition of cheating, the Supreme Court ruled against Phil Ivey, a professional gambler who had ensured cards at London’s Crockfords Casino were sorted so that he could identify those most likely to win.
The casino had refused to pay him £7.7mn in winnings. The court decided that Ivey’s conduct was dishonest because ordinary people would regard it as such.
The question of how this translates to the political arena is key.
Christopher Bamford, a barrister, said a candidate could be seen as interfering with a betting market if he or she bet on losing and then deliberately ran a poor campaign. There is no suggestion the candidate suspended by Labour, Kevin Craig, acted in such a way. Craig, whose communications company had worked on the branding for Responsible Gambling Week, has said he made a “huge mistake” in placing the bet and apologised.
Betting has become part of the furniture at Westminster. Betting companies are among the biggest providers of hospitality to MPs and officials. Odds are regularly quoted in the media, particularly on questions where there is little opinion polling, giving bookmakers cheap publicity.
In 2022, Ladbrokes offered odds on whether Liz Truss would last longer as prime minister than a lettuce would take to rot. Matthew Shaddick, head of political betting at Ladbrokes, said in 2015 that those betting on politics included “political obsessives: activists, poll-watchers, or they work in political HQs”.
This is not just an issue in politics: in football, where betting advertising and sponsorship have spiralled, several players have been suspended for betting on matches.
Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood has called for a broad ban on politicians betting. But Birmingham university’s Pickles said it would be very difficult to define any ban’s limits. “Should unpaid political advisers be barred from political gambling? What about newspaper columnists?”
Although there are no industry-level statistics, operators and analysts say the volume of political betting is tiny. For example, on Betfair — the betting exchange that is the only place to disclose the size of the market — “Next Prime Minister after Rishi Sunak” has attracted only £820,000 of matched bets as of Tuesday, compared with £10.2mn for “Uefa Euro 2024 — Winner”.
One industry executive who asked not to be named said political betting products accounted for a few per cent of the total betting volume, but “there is customer demand for political betting”.
Operators generally focus on large events such as the US presidential election, new leaders of the Conservative and Labour parties and voting in some top-level UK constituencies — as well as niche amusing questions such as the colour of the chancellor’s tie on Budget day.