Fast buck.....

I wrote a piece for the DT in 1989. This was election time. I was returning  officer for the Parliamentary Elections, and the DT phoned me at home early one morning and asked if I would write a piece called ‘My Election’ for the op-ed page. They wanted 1000 words and they wanted it in the next 20 minutes! They said I could dictate it to a copy-taker. So I duly obliged.

The guts of my piece concerned my small but beautifully formed friend, Arthur, who was also a Returning Officer. Arthur’s main interest in life was racing. We were both at a meeting in Mayfair but as it dragged on I noticed that he was getting very agitated. When I asked what was up, he said that he had the 3 candidates’ £500 cash deposits in his brief case and he was on to an 8 to 1 certainty in the 1 o’clock at Fakenham races.

Incredulous, I said ‘Arthur, surely to God you are not going to put £1,500 of the candidates’ money on a nag?’

At a few minutes to 1 o’clock the meeting  broke up and we dashed across the road to the ‘Horse and Groom’ pub opposite to get the result from the Irish landlord who was also a turf addict. Too late! And the bloody horse won!

The question I later posed was if Arthur had managed to lay his bet who should have collected – him or the candidates?

The candidates had not gambled, so how could they be entitled to the winnings? The money Arthur put at risk was not his, so how could he be entitled to profit?

What would Albert Haddock made of it?

Actually the real winner was me. A few days later I got a cheque from the DT for £600, the fastest buck I have ever made!

More relevant to our own times, I read in the Eye that the ‘rolling comment factory’, the DT Blogs which hosts Janet Daley, Norman Tebitt and other luminaries has introduced a ‘culling’ mechanism. The writers are judged not by the quality of their posts but by the number of hits that they get, which as we know has a very high proportion of people who are – shall we say – a little disturbed. Anyone who stays in the lowest 25% gets a warning and after another 3 months they get the boot. Hardly conducive to rational argument and much more likely to encourage sensational headlines and barmy rants. According to a DT source, Delingpole is always in top spot ‘because he really is batshit mad!’