Författare: Sam Power Senior Lecturer in Politics University of Sussex

As gamblegate stretches into its second week, it seems there is no end to the revelations about MPs misbehaving at the bookies. And naturally, as when any significant ethical misconduct is in the news, it didn’t take long for this one to be equated with the expenses scandal.

Partygate was trundling into its sixth month when we were asked: “will this prove as damaging as the expenses scandal?”. Even the little remembered – except by me – 2015 election expenses saga, in which parties were accused of going over campaign spending limits, at one point threatened to “become like expenses”.

A BBC documentary even had a go at suggesting the expenses scandal led to Brexit – though rather unsuccessfully – and caused me to (somewhat grumpily) argue in my book that if you squint hard enough you can make anything about Brexit these days.

What was the expenses scandal, again?

The expenses scandal, for those requiring a quick refresher, broke in 2009. It was an extraordinary set of revelations, drip-fed to the public by the Daily Telegraph, on the many different ways members of parliament were interpreting their right to claim personal expenses from public funds. Some were downright illegal – such as claims on false invoices. Others were technically legal but ethically dubious, such as claims to recover the costs of cleaning moats and repairing helipads or buying biscuits and trouser-presses.

The reporting went on and on, and, as former academic Alexandra Kelso said, “day after turgid day … seemed to confirm the very worst beliefs of those who are cynical about British politics and the politicians who engage in it”.

Is this starting to sound familiar? If it doesn’t yet, it could still. Academic Phil Cowley and writer Matthew Bailey have outlined the legion of ways in which the British people, including MPs, have been betting on politics for more than 100 years.

In recent days, journalists Robert Peston, and Lewis Goodall have suggested the practice of candidates placing a bet on themselves to lose is more common than we might think.

Goodall even suggested that “it’s actually a bit of a political tradition … almost a bit of gallows humour”.

Likewise, using expenses to “top up” your salary as an MP was, prior to the 2009 scandal, a common practice and an open secret in parliament.

So, in both cases, we have a practice which is more common than we think, and which is not considered a massive problem in political circles – until the public finds out.

It’s unlikely, however, that the gambling scandal will end up as large and all-encompassing as expenses. While betting on the outcome – or date – of an election is outrageous (and stupid and, yes, corrupt) you are not in effect defrauding the taxpayer. That seems to me to be a big distinction. With the best will in the world, it seems silly rather than sinister.

British politics is familiar with scandals.
Alamy/Associated Press/Lefteris Pitarakis

The timing is also important. We are five weeks into an election campaign that has seemed like a foregone conclusion since well before the starting gun was even fired. It is, to all intents and purposes, the campaign’s silly season. In a matter of days, the focus will shift to the actual election itself – and (failing some kind of utterly absurd turnaround in fortunes) what is expected to be the first Labour government in the UK for 14 years.

That’s not to say that gamblegate won’t matter or that it won’t have any kind of causal tail. Labour has hinted at – and made vague manifesto commitments to – a review of ethics and standards. The pre-election revelations may embolden Starmer to pursue these.

We might also see some targeted regulation on politicians betting. It doesn’t seem a particular over-reaction to this affair to consider whether politicians should be allowed to bet on races that they are a part of, even if it’s paltry sums we’re talking about.

A cautionary tale

In both the expenses scandal and gamblegate, things got pretty ridiculous, pretty quickly. Insider betting, is obviously wrong – and illegal. Just as submitting false invoices is obviously wrong – and illegal. An “emotional hedge” against oneself in an election is weird, sure, but probably less problematic in the grand scheme of things.

The nadir of the expenses scandal, was the absurd categorising of MPs as saints and sinners, based largely on how much an they had claimed. The monetary amount became shorthand for whether someone was a “good” politician or not.

There are a multitude of reasons, not least basic geography, why one might claim more expenses. Those MPs representing constituencies far away from London may need more, for example. And, not for nothing, not claiming an expense might mean that you are doing a pretty shoddy job for your constituents.

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These kinds of scandals take hold in the public imagination because they are easy to understand and they confirm our worst suspicions about politicians and politics. As former Labour MP Tony Wright put it: “Policy issues might be complicated, but fiddled expenses [are] not.” But this doesn’t mean we should create a playground pile-on and treat every case as the same. The risk there is that we end up embedding negative perceptions further.

In this instance the expenses scandal should serve as a cautionary tale. Not because it caused Brexit (it didn’t even really cause MPs involved to lose their seats in 2010). Instead, it shows how genuinely scandalous things can metastasise into the trivial, so that things that probably shouldn’t matter end up destroying careers and undermining democracy. When this process starts, it’s probably best to catch a breath before adding further fuel to the fire. Läs mer…

Many stories of political wrongdoing involve an element of plain stupidity – at least the ones we find out about. In fact, many of the most famous scandals in modern history have involved moments where one thinks, “Crikey, these guys aren’t half as smart as they think they are.”

Partygate is a pretty good example. Having illegal gatherings in government premises is wrong – taking photos of said parties is asking to be caught. And the 2009 expenses scandal had its fair share of elements which raised an eyebrow – floating ornamental duck house anyone?

There are any number of problems with betting on an election date when you obviously have some kind of proximity to the person who makes the decision about when that election is called – especially when the decision appears to come out of nowhere to practically everyone else. But, without wanting to sound too much like Michael Gove, it’s hard to properly unpick everything whilst an investigation is going on.

This legal issue makes it quite hard to analyse any political scandal until well after the fact. So far we know that two Conservative election candidates (who both remain in the race) are under investigation after bets placed on when a general election would be called were flagged as suspicious with the Gambling Commission.

Craig Williams, Rishi Sunak’s former aide and a candidate for Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr said: “I put a flutter on the general election some weeks ago. This has resulted in some routine inquiries and I confirm I will fully cooperate with these”.

Another challenge when considering stories of this kind is trying to keep a straight face. Often, they are quite funny. Terrible, and representative of the worst kind of entitlement – corruption is, after all, the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. But these cases are also often undeniably funny.

The thought of Helen McNamara, the government’s former ethics chief, lugging a karaoke machine into the Cabinet Office for an illegal party is quite funny.

Inadvertently claiming pornography as an expense is funny.

Reports that Williams only staked £100 on what are pretty generous odds is quite funny.

Protestors floated a mocked up ornamental duck house past the houses of parliament in 2009 in protest over the expenses scandal which saw one MP claim £1,645 for just such an item.
EPA/Andy Rain

At the same time, the reason why none of this is funny is that each case threatens to reinforce our worst suspicions about politicians – that they are all in it for themselves and, more worryingly, that they are all as bad as each other. The actions of one, or a group, infect the body politic. A plague on both your houses.

There’s a reason that the Ipsos veracity index – which measures whether the British public trust certain professions to tell the truth – finds that politicians are always towards the bottom. But there’s also a reason, perhaps, that politicians reached their lowest ever score when figures were released in late 2023.

They’re not ‘all as bad as each other’

Most politicians aren’t the irredeemable liars we make them out to be. They aren’t necessarily venal, self-interested and corrupt. In fact, most are quite the opposite. The vast majority of the hundreds of people who sit in parliament and work in government are motivated by a strong (if differing) sense of duty, fairness, and the idea of politics as a public service.

In a 2012 article, political scientist Matthew Flinders warns against the wholesale embrace of a “bad faith model of politics”, in which the starting assumption is that everyone is in it for themselves. This feeds a narrative that democratic institutions, and democracy itself, is failing. Flinders notes that “democracy is more fragile” than people think and that demonising politicians as a whole because of the scandals of a few, “risks unnecessarily eviscerating public confidence in democratic politics”.

And, OK, claiming pornography on expenses is funny, but Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary who made the claim (potentially for pornography watched by someone else in the first place) has also spoken at length about the personal damage these revelations caused. She has also highlighted the relatively simple mistake – claiming for a cable TV bundle without looking at who’s been watching what – that led to the end of her career.

And the more I look at it, the more the election date gambling debacle feels like a story as much about simply bad politics and sloppy thinking than a broken political class.

In fact, the entire Conservative election campaign can be tracked by its various examples of sloppiness. Every “marmalade dropper” moment so far – the kind of thing you can’t quite believe you are reading – falls into this category. From announcing the election in the pouring rain to ditching D-Day celebrations to running an attack ad warning voters not to “bet on Labour” while your own side is being probed for effectively shorting the election on the gambling market, we’ve seen unforced error after unforced error.

If only the prime minister had access to a bespoke indoor briefing room from where he could make important, dry announcements.
Alamy

In his magisterial tome, How Tory Governments Fall, historian Anthony Seldon identifies nine factors that have been evident in the failure of various Conservative governments to retain power since 1783. The one that has always stuck with me, and feels most pertinent today, is “the strength of feeling of ‘time for a change’”.

Sometimes, especially if you’ve been at something for a long time, you run out of steam. And the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years at this point.

Political scientist Tim Bale, in his equally magisterial tome, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron – and in a chapter titled aptly for this discussion “losing the plot” – talks of the institutional issues longstanding governments have. Of a failure to renew the project, of serving up more of the (unpopular) same. Of plain and simple inertia.

This scandal is less about politics, and a corrupt political class, and more about something much more relatable – the people in charge are just drained. The men and women who have been running the UK for over a decade have become like a football team that has achieved a relative period of success, but that is stuck and out of ideas.

The election date gambling story is the epitome of this. This is a party simply tired of governing. Of course, the increasing worry for the Conservatives, is that the public are just as – if not more – tired of them governing, too. Läs mer…