PicoBlog

It's not really the action that grates. It's how tawdry it is. How cheap. How low-grade, piss-poor, fucking pitiful it is. 

The gambling scandal looks set to run and run. It began when it emerged that Rishi Sunak's parliamentary private secretary (PPS), Craig Williams, placed a bet on the election date before the announcement confirming when it would take place. On Monday, one of Sunak's police bodyguards was arrested. Now Laura Saunders, Tory candidate for Bristol North West, is being looked into by the Gambling Commission. Her husband, Tony Lee, is the party's director of campaigns. He's been placed on a leave of absence.

Tory HQ's statements in the press have been quite revealing. They can't quite rule out that more names will emerge. The open nature of the response suggests that we could see more individuals fall under investigation, that the story will stretch through the second half of the campaign. Guardian and FT analysis has seen evidence of a surge in bets on a July election in the days before the announcement, including large sums suggestive of strong confidence.

We all know the score with how these stories work now. It breaks and then there's an investigation. The investigation can be by anyone - the police, the political party, the standards commissioner, the Gambling Commission. But once it starts, a paradoxical defence emerges: ‘We can't talk about it while the investigation is ongoing’. Williams got it in early. "I'm not expanding because it’s an independent process," he said when the story first emerged. "The Gambling Commission are looking at it now." Saunders ratcheted up that tactic with a legal threat. "It is inappropriate to conduct any investigation of this kind via the media, and doing so risks jeopardising the work of the Gambling Commission and the integrity of its investigation," her solicitors said. "The publication of the BBC's story is premature and is a clear infringement of Ms Saunders' privacy rights. She is considering legal action." It's very touching to watch these people suddenly develop a concern with probity and integrity.

Thankfully, we do not need to come to conclusions about the intention of their actions. We can confine ourselves merely to its stupidity, which is truly beyond rational comprehension. Consider this: Williams placed a bet for £100. He would have only gained £500. That's the amount he staked his career on. That's what he gambled the electoral fortunes of his party on. It really doesn't matter what the investigations find. Perhaps he really had no idea that this could be against the rules. Perhaps his comprehension of the world is so limited that he saw no ethical or legal objections to what he was doing. Politically it changes nothing. On point of incontestable fact, he is too intellectually deficient to be anywhere near government, or indeed involved in any organisation of significant size.

And yet all these people are at fairly senior levels. Williams was the prime minister's PPS. The PPS is one of those roles no-one really understands. Most ministers have one. It doesn't really mean anything. The PPS is kind of a nothingness - a vague bucket of disparate duties for potentially up-and-coming MPs to be brought into the ministerial payroll vote and forced to support the government. But nonetheless, he was PPS to the prime minister himself. That's senior enough to earn bragging rights - you’re spending serious time with the most powerful person in the country. Lee was director of campaigns. They're not random MPs or candidates. Indeed, they couldn't have been, or they'd not have potentially had access to information about when the election would be held. By definition, they are in privileged positions.

Nor can this be reduced to individual personalities, or the random defects of human nature. The gambling scandal is a direct continuation of the core themes which have emerged over years of Tory rule. It is part of a pattern, which was not present under Theresa May but became pronounced under Boris Johnson and was then left unaddressed by his successors. It shares a basic sensibility with partygate, the Owen Paterson affair, the Chris Pincher scandal, countless procurement controversies, numerous examples of ministerial misbehaviour and a whole cornucopia of political reprehensibility.

Leaders create a culture. They do so by virtue of the individuals they recruit and the behaviour that they reward. Sunak decided that someone of Williams’ evident mental limitations should be promoted to work by his side. I refuse to accept that this degree of stupid isn't visible from space, that it would not radiate out from every answer someone gave in a conversation. And once someone is that stupid - or even if they're quite intelligent but lack a fundamental moral core - they will take their social and professional cues from the behaviour they see around them, the standards they see set by people in senior positions. This type of thing doesn't come from nowhere. 

This is one of the things Keir Starmer gets right. "If it was one of my candidates," he said last night, "they'd be gone and their feet would not have touched the floor." This approach typifies the way he has handled disciplinary procedures in the party, most importantly on anti-semitism. Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked from her front bench role for spreading a tweet. Jeremy Corbnyn was thrown out the party for repeating a claim. Sometimes the response was perhaps too tough, too draconian. But the principle succeeded: discipline as a form of communication. It sent a message to people in the organisation about the types of standards they were expected to live up to. When Starmer was at his worst, for instance in the Diane Abbott affair, it was because he betrayed that notion - he failed to act quickly, he failed to move decisively, whether for or against her, and instead allowed it to fester. That sent an altogether different message.

In his first speech as prime minister Sunak promised "to restore trust". Immediately afterwards, he gave Suella Braverman her job as home secretary back, just days after she lost it for breaching the ministerial code. She later asked civil servants to investigate whether she could take bespoke speed awareness courses after she was caught speeding when attorney general. Sunak did not order an investigation by the ethics advisor and waved the issue away. That is the message the prime minister sends. And it’s one that is heard in his organisation.

Why did these people behave the way they did? Because that is the social climate in which they operate. These are the types of people and the examples of behaviour around them.

The gambling scandal bloomed from a soil made fertile by a failure of leadership. And it is therefore a perfectly fitting end to a Conservative administration which has been defined by malpractice, irresponsibility and ethical negligence.

I can confirm that Amorgos is very, very, very nice. I wish for you to understand the pain of being in such a pretty location and having to pull your sun-kissed joyous soul back into the dank, tawdry world of British politics. It hurts very much indeed. But in a moment I will have a cold beer, and I shall sit in the sun, and all of the horror can fade away again, for a couple days at least. Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are.

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