How much further can the Tories sink? Now all bets are off

Editorial: The prime minister has finally pulled his support from the parliamentary candidates accused of misconduct in the gambling row – but not before more damage has been done to the party’s rock-bottom electoral chances

Rishi Sunak has withdrawn the Tory party’s support for Craig Williams, left, and Laura Saunders in the aftermath of the betting scandal (PA/Getty)

When it was first reported that Craig Williams, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary, had placed a bet on the date of the election, he admitted: “I put a flutter on the general election some weeks ago.”

For two weeks, Rishi Sunak has hidden behind the fiction that “it wouldn’t be proper to comment further, until any process is concluded”, as the party said in a statement at the time. His spokespeople, when asked why Mr Williams and Laura Saunders, another parliamentary candidate alleged to have bet on the election date, had not been suspended, simply repeated that it would be wrong to pre-empt the investigations.

Until Tuesday, when it suddenly became right to pre-empt the investigations, and the Conservative Party disowned both of them. The defence was always nonsense because Mr Williams at least had admitted what he had done and said it was an “error of judgement”.

Ms Saunders has not commented, but it is quite normal to suspend someone accused of serious wrongdoing while investigations are made. Indeed, a police officer had already been suspended from the prime minister’s close protection squad after being arrested for betting on the election date – in what looked like a double standard.

What is more, the two party officials alleged to have been involved in election-date betting have already suspended themselves. Tony Lee, the head of campaigns, who is married to Ms Saunders, and Nick Mason, the party’s chief data officer, had taken a “leave of absence”.

Mr Sunak appears to have realised, belatedly, that he should have suspended the two candidates straight away. It is too late to remove their names or party affiliations from the ballot papers, but the party will no longer campaign for them, and if they are elected, they would sit as independents.

Needless to say, they are now less likely to be elected than they were. Ms Saunders, fighting a Labour-held seat, never stood much of a chance, but it was touch and go as to whether Mr Williams would hold onto his Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr seat. It is now touch and gone.

The interruption of Mr Williams’s parliamentary career is not, however, the whole of the penalty paid by the Conservative Party for his error of judgement. He has tarnished the election campaign for all his former colleagues. As Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, commented, the scandal rings with echoes of the fury over lockdown parties in Downing Street. “It looks like one rule for them and one rule for us,” Mr Gove said. Again. “That’s the most potentially damaging thing.”

The scandal is disastrous for Mr Sunak and the Conservative Party. Already reeling from the prime minister’s misjudgement in returning early from the D-Day commemorations in Normandy, the last thing the Tory campaign needed was another blunder. The last thing it needed was a scandal that showed Conservative politicians in a bad light and was easy to understand.

The greed, entitlement and recklessness on display is awe-inspiring. No doubt some or all of the fools who placed these bets will protest that they did not actually know what the prime minister had decided, and were only guessing. But as Mr Williams said two weeks ago: “I should have thought of how it looks.”

And no doubt the prime minister will feel hard done by, in that neither his D-Day mistake nor his failure to suspend the gamblers immediately is about his record in government or about his promises for the future. Except that one of his promises on taking office was “integrity”.

In this case, he has failed to deliver.