Our MPs can’t help but gamble Politics is a game of risk

As for Rishi Sunak, it is, of course, a bitter irony that his roll of the electoral dice has been skewed by the scandal of politicians making dodgy wagers against manifestly unfavourable odds. As it stands, five Conservative political figures, including two now-unendorsed parliamentary candidates, have come under investigation by the gambling watchdog for placing potentially illicit bets on the date of the election. It’s a squalid spectacle. The characters, nonentities; the motivations, base; the sums of money involved, comparatively paltry.

But however hard it is to summon up enthusiastic moral condemnation, it is even harder still to feel anything close to surprise. That gambling is, apparently, rife at Westminster is probably in no small part because it calls on the same dispositions and skills as politics does.

If there is an underlying unity to the many and lurid transgressions of our outgoing cohort of parliamentarians, it is their near pathological inability to properly respond to risk. But, then, anyone who wins a seat in the house of commons is, more or less in virtue of that very fact, someone who fancies their chances against sometimes wildly unfavourable odds. Even for the well-qualified candidates, merely being selected by a local association is an often random, taxing and capricious process, a fact testified to by the gleeful operation of Twitter accounts such as “Has Sebastian Payne got a safe seat yet?”.

It is an important fact about MPs that each and every one is a person who decided at some point to channel vast resources of time and energy, and very often their own money, into a process that would at some point or other see them being humiliatingly rejected in a regional leisure centre at 4am. It comes to them all, eventually. And for the time that they are in post, the attraction of thinking of much political action on the model of a gamble rarely dissipates. “ACHAB”, the Tory diarist Alan Clark used to console himself when some scheme or political wheeze seemed to be heading for the rocks: “Anything Can Happen at Backgammon”. The phrase was one exported from the gambling room at Clark’s club, Brooks’s “where games can swing at a late stage on an unpredictable run of the dice”.

Nor would it be sensible to blame politicians too much for acting on the basis of instincts that might share much of the phenomenology of the often unreliable twinges of a gambler’s gut instinct. Sometimes there may be little else to go on. Such instincts, under the right circumstances, may even yield a distinctive kind of political knowledge. It is a well-attested insight of psychology that gut reactions, and fast and frugal heuristics, can provide a reliable basis for knowledge. An expert political operators may, for instance, instantly read a room, or effortlessly notice the most powerful person in it; in the subtle cues of a colleague’s facial expression they might detect weakness or the prospect of betrayal; like a master chess player taking in a board at a glance, they might instantly see a position as a “win” for one side rather than the other.

The most effective political operators tend to be those who have a lot of such intuitive knowledge. Whether they do or not is usually the sort of thing that one can assess only on the basis of demonstrated performance. Rishi Sunak, by most people’s lights, has very little.

More challenging than the thought that our politicians might be gamblers by disposition — not all of them cut from Clark’s cloth, admittedly — is the knowledge that we actually want them to be rather good at it. Risk-taking is constitutive, rather than incidental, to political life. Political realists, going back to Machiavelli, have emphasised the intelligent management of luck as being key to effective political leadership. A level of daring that might be inappropriate in more sheltered walks of life can be indispensable to successful political action, aided by the absence of any clearly defined or properly enforceable code of professional ethics in political life — the non-existence of which so distresses Question Time audiences.

Calls to clean up politics, to drain the swamp and restore a sense of decency to public life are leitmotifs of politics of the populist Right, Left and Centre. That such partisan charges can be credibly made from all sides suggests that a general phenomenon is being misdiagnosed as something more parochial. There hasn’t been a sudden and local collapse in political standards; this critique is insensitive to characteristics of politicians that are long-lived, widespread, and less contingent to the effective operation of political life than might first appear.

Even if panic about the rapid decline of public morals is unwarranted, the widespread belief that such decline is taking place creates a problem, and ironically, an occasion for opportunism. Public trust in politicians has reached an all-time low. Ruthlessly indulging the exceptionalist view in the final leadership debate, Sir Keir Starmer declared with uncanny historical precision that “over the last 14 years politics has become too much about self-entitlement”. Instead, he suggests that Labour will restore a lost ethic of public service to political life. But the suggestion that one can remould the characters of politicians by moral fiat is one that fails to take seriously the structural features that virtually guarantee these traits are selected for. Perhaps Keir Starmer knows that. As Machiavelli would no doubt advise, making a convincing pitch for the restoration of public trust need have nothing to do with actually acknowledging the truth.

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John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

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