How do you decide it’s a good idea to risk getting a criminal record for fraud in the hopes of winning just one day’s salary!?
That’s the really stupid part of all this.
Small amount of money massive personal and political consequences. Hilariously stupid.
Classic Conservative move there
Just regular old stupid evil.
I think it just highlights loose morales for a quick quid. Defrauding a bookmaker with inside knowledge is still fraud.
I regularly had inside information on the winners of certain television “reality” tv shows, and could easily chuck £25 on the winner, knowing that it was easy money… but my own moral compass stopped me from doing it because I thought it was wrong.
I’m not saying that I’m better or worse than anyone, and I can see that the only company I would be defrauding would be a bookmaker… but I saw fraud as fraud, which still didn’t sit right with me.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide placed a £100 bet on a July election just three days before the prime minister named the date, the Guardian can reveal.
The Gambling Commission is understood to have launched an inquiry after Craig Williams, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary, who became an MP in 2019, placed a bet with the bookmaker Ladbrokes on Sunday 19 May in his local constituency of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr.
It is understood that a red flag was automatically raised by Ladbrokes as the bet in Williams’ name was potentially placed by a “politically exposed person”, and the bookmaker is particularly cautious over “novelty” markets.
The £100 bet, which could have led to a £500 payout on odds of 5/1, is believed to have been placed via an online account that would have required the user to provide personal details including their date of birth and debit card.
The prime minister is said to have opted for a pre-summer election in April, when it became clear that growth figures were going to show inflation falling and an economy returning to better health.
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister; Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s chief of staff; and James Forsyth, his political secretary, were at the heart of the deliberations.
The original article contains 867 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Question is… did he pick the right date 😂
Did I miss the part where the bet was something oddly specific where the aide could actually significantly impact akin to shaving points, or throwing a fight…?
Because it just says he bet on the general election, which honestly feels relatively harmless in the context of a society with widespread legalized gambling.
Not that I’d shed any tears over a Sunak aide getting fucked by any legal process, including a dubious one.
Can someone tell me if I’m missed something here?
He bet on the date of the election. It’s not that he could impact the date (probably) but that he knew the announcement would happen a couple of days later. So less akin to throwing a fight and more having insider information about who was going to win. To me it seems similar (tho less financially rewarding) to buying stock in a company when your role in government means you know the value is going to increase soon when a new policy is introduced.
Actually…that makes a lot more sense and I don’t recall that being brought up in article, but maybe I missed it.
I would say that elections are public affairs, and have widespread coverage, including public polling data, but I can see the analogy to insider trading.
Even if the only one’s hurt here are the bookies, it’s probably not an activity that should be publicly accepted as normal.
Yeah, to be fair the article’s not very clear.
I would say that elections are public affairs, and have widespread coverage, including public polling data, but I can see the analogy to insider trading.
To be even clearer, he didn’t bet on the outcome of the election, just that it would take place in July. Legally Sunak has to call an election before January 2025 but there has been a lot of speculation for the last six months about when it’s going to happen. A lot of people assumed we wouldn’t have an election until the autumn so Sunak’s announcement a few weeks ago came as a big surprise.
You can bet on that kind of stuff in the UK?
We can bet on most things.
