Election-betting scandal further ties the Tories up in knots

Good morning. The Conservative campaign has been rocked after a second parliamentary candidate — Laura Saunders, the Conservative candidate in Bristol North West, and the wife of the party’s head of campaigning, Tony Lee — became embroiled in a widening election-betting scandal.

The danger of this scandal, I think, is that it’s pretty funny. If Saunders and Rishi Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams really were using their advance knowledge of when the prime minister was going to call an early election to make a quick buck, the whole affair is so small-bore and obviously detectable that it makes the whole party look ridiculous.

I’m reminded of a phrase in Alan Clark’s excellent account of the Conservative party from 1922 to 1997, The Tories (sadly out of print, though there are quite a lot of copies available on AbeBooks; it is also the kind of book that is surely ripe for a reprint by Biteback, which usually has an eye for such things) about Conservative “sleaze” in the 1990s:

What was felt to be demeaning was the absurdity of it all. Combined with their evident incompetence, and their staleness, it caused the Conservative party to forfeit that most valuable of all political currencies in a democratic society — respect.

The Conservative party has won elections when it has been thought of as mean, but I do not foresee that it will win elections anytime soon when it looks hapless and silly — and this story makes it look both.

It also embodies so many of the flaws in Sunak’s election campaign. Some more thoughts on why below.

Tall tales

Rishi Sunak was “incredibly angry” to learn about the two parliamentary candidates who are alleged to have bet on the date of the election, he claimed last night on the BBC, which raises the question of whether the prime minister has an elastic definition of the word “incredibly” or the word “angry” — seeing as this incredible anger doesn’t seem to extend far enough for him to disavow either candidate.

The prime minister’s rhetorical shield here is that he is waiting for the independent process to do its work. But the reality is that Sunak, more than anyone, knows one way or the other when his parliamentary aide Craig Williams knew that he was going to announce a July 4 election date; he knows, more than anyone, when his party’s head of campaigning was in the loop. He doesn’t need an investigation to tell him that. Sunak is really the only person who knows for certain whether Williams is a fool or a knave — and the only person who can act accordingly.

As it is, Williams is still a parliamentary aide to Sunak while Saunders still has the party’s endorsement in Bristol North West. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that there is a near-zero chance that Labour are going to lose Bristol North West to the Tory party in two weeks. Disavowing Saunders’s candidacy and finding someone among the ranks of potential Tory MPs who is neither a fool nor knave to replace Williams as Sunak’s parliamentary aide is the absolute least the prime minister could do, and everyone knows it.

This is a bigger problem with Sunak’s campaign, which is that he says a bunch of things that everyone knows to be untrue. A Sunak government is not going to increase defence spending, solve the crisis in England’s prisons, introduce a “quadruple lock” on pensions, reintroduce national service or gradually abolish national insurance while keeping income tax and VAT flat or falling. It just isn’t.

Sunak yesterday compared his ailing campaign against Keir Starmer to his failed one against Liz Truss, saying that Starmer was offering “the same fantasy” as Truss was. The reality is that Starmer is offering the same fantasy, not as Liz Truss in 2022, but as Rishi Sunak in 2024: that ambitious pledges on the condition of the UK’s public services can be paired with self-denying ordinances on tax.

Sunak’s campaign has been marred by a number of gaffes and avoidable mistakes these past four weeks. But the biggest mistake is the one he made some time ago, to disavow the decisions he made as chancellor and instead to try and position himself as a tax-cutting prime minister. It’s not plausible, it flies in the face of his record these past four years, and it locks him into a campaign where his message boils down to “the last five years have been dreadful, please vote for me”. And like his claim to be “incredibly angry”, it reveals an astonishing contempt for everyone hearing it that Sunak thinks anyone is going to believe it.

When I travel the country, people have noticed that contempt, and that is part of why the Tory party’s position has declined during this campaign — and why even the best projections for the party’s electoral fate currently put them on course for a worse result even than in 1997.

Now try this

After a lovely drink with a friend, I decided to treat myself to a late, solo dinner with a book at the restaurant Moro and had a wonderful time. The food, as usual, was great, but unlike so many restaurants which treat solo diners with hostility, the service was charming, attentive but not cloying — particularly so given it was late and I was one of the last people to leave the restaurant. It’s a great after-show option, and not far from Sadler’s Wells.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.

Top stories today

• It’s coming home | Disillusionment grows in Rishi Sunak’s Richmond seat, as opposition parties plan, for the first time in history, to oust a sitting prime minister.

• The winner takes it all | This year’s election is set to bring the most distorted result in history thanks to first-past-the-post, the FT’s chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch, explores here.

• Ill-gotten gains? | What’s the law behind the election-betting scandal? Read this explainer to find out.

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