Loss on day £300
(Sandown's proving really expensive this year - which is surprising considering it's my favourite track)
Here's some guff from Boris Piccaninny Piffle Johnson- excerpts of a speech to bankers - taken from Robert Peston's facebook page.
"When you look at Winston Churchill you see a man whose whole career was about risk taking – he was a compulsive gambler. This was a man who took one compulsive gamble after another – and he took all sorts of positions on things that went disastrously wrong. He was wrong about Galipoli, he was wrong about the gold standard, he was wrong about India, he was wrong about the abdication, he was spectacularly wrong for most of his political career.
But in the 1930s he of course took one giant bet. He took a giant bet against Hitler and the Nazi party. And to use the language of finance, he shorted the Nazis in a big way, at a time when much of the British establishment was actually filling their boots with that particular stock. And even when Hitler had taken Czechoslovakia and Poland – and Belgium and Holland and France were about to fall, there was a huge coalition of people in London, high minded liberal people, who were passionately opposed to Churchill and to what they thought he stood for, and his shameless opportunism, and all the rest of it.
(Several missing paragraphs because they’re, um, boring. One day Eton and Oxford will be held to account for the "debating club" shits they shower us with)
" A compulsive gambler was proved triumphantly right. And I think the only lesson I draw from that is that sometimes you do need to do the difficult thing, and you do need to take a position that everyone says is too fraught with risk. And the lesson I draw from that is the UK today has every reason to be confident about our future and what we can achieve”.
Now, I may not know much about politics but I do know a lot about gambling. As someone who has always seen Churchill as a basically terrible and reckless gambler who got incredibly lucky on the biggest gamble he ever made, this much makes sense to me. I'm not sure how Boris, projecting horribly over a terrible analogy, thinks he's making a Churchillian gamble, though. Firstly, he's backed both sides at odds-on so far, so is already a loser, Now, he's nailed his colours to the one mast. but it's hardly a balls-out, contrarian, hit one out of the park, mega gamble on a complete no-hoper. Unless I've read the referendum result wrong, he's just backing the majority view.
Not just a lying entitled chancing prick, but shit at maths as well...