Politicians should be allowed to have a flutter

Let’s not beat around the bush – people close to the Prime Minister betting on the date of the election was colossally stupid. While it’s unlikely to sway the election, the public backlash was obvious and justified.

But there is a serious danger that we take this regulation of gambling too far. The involvement of the police and application of “anti-cheating” laws is an overreaction and part of the nefarious tendency to regulate every aspect of our lives.

The 2005 Gambling Act introduced the idea of “cheating”. This is extremely broadly defined, and what constitutes cheating is left up to the courts to figure out later. The Act even explicitly states that the cheater doesn’t even need to have improved their odds of winning, or win anything.

Having a provision against cheating might sound sensible but remember this isn’t there to make gambling fairer for ordinary punters, it’s to help boost the profits of the gambling companies – firms which have retained the right to void bets retrospectively and ban customers who make too much profit.

More than just existing to help the gambling companies, taken to its logical conclusion this framework creates a murky world where everything and anything with an information disparity could be classed as “cheating”. The journalist Matt Levine famously jokes that “everything is insider trading” in the United States – poking fun at these broad laws that class any edge as potentially criminal. We are approaching a similar level of absurdity here.

Gambling has been around as long as we have. The fundamental premise of a bet is that each side is saying “I am better at predicting the probability of an event happening than you are”. And so both sides hope to make a profit from perceived imbalance of insight or information. As long as gambling has existed, so has information disparity. That could be anything from getting a tip from a bloke in the loos at the dogs, to really fancying Millwall in the league this year because of their new signing.

Admittedly things are muddied if someone has information regarding a binary outcome that is a “certainty”, which is what’s alleged in the case of these political bets. Yet anyone who has been around politics knows that nothing is a certainty until it’s happened. And anyone who’s ever placed has taken the risk that the person on the other side of it has better information than they do. As a UK Supreme Court justice put it, “what is cheating in one form of game may be legitimate competition in another”.

We should let the public judge politicians for betting on private information, just as we should let the football or casinos have their own codes of conduct or terms and conditions. But if we criminalise this, the only people that win are the gambling companies and bureaucrats.

Michael Young is a former Special Adviser to Boris Johnson. He now runs Lindus Health