Just before the general election, gambling podcast Bet The House introduced listeners to a ‘political betting expert’ who was, allegedly, ‘right at the top of his game’.
His name was Rory Campbell, who is perhaps better known as the eldest child of Tony Blair‘s former spin chief Alastair.
Rory, 37, is an Oxford graduate who parlayed a gift for mathematics into a career as a sort of professional gambler.
A keen poker player, who competed at the 2011 World Series in Las Vegas, he more recently worked as a football analyst, using algorithmic models to measure the value of players and predict the outcome of matches.
On the domestic front, Campbell Jr is also, like many members of his family, something of a political junkie.
Or, as Bet The House host Nick Luck, a former Channel 4 racing presenter, put it ‘a man whose knowledge of the intricacies of football betting is matched only by who won what seat when and how’.
During the course of the podcast, Rory was therefore asked to advise how listeners might profit from Polling Day.
His advice? To have a punt on Jeremy Corbyn, who was standing as an independent in Islington North (having been kicked out of Labour) suffering a shock defeat to his former party’s official candidate. ‘This happens to be my constituency,’ he said.
Rory Campbell, right, with his father Alastair and brother Calum at West Ham’s London Stadium
‘Initially my expectation was actually that he [Corbyn] was going to do very well. But I’ve been a bit kind of underwhelmed by the local feeling around it really. And I am a big believer, in this election particularly, the national narrative is going to really, really over-ride the local one. So I would bet Labour at the prices, yeah.’
Those who took Rory’s advice will, as it happens, have lived to regret it: Corbyn actually managed to hold the seat with a thumping 7,000-vote majority.
Yet they won’t be the only punters who feel they’ve been sold a pup by the son of Britain’s most famous spin doctor. Far from it.
This week, Rory Campbell found himself at the centre of an epic row involving the sudden collapse of a football gambling syndicate that he has been quietly running for the past seven years.
It makes the phrase Bet The House seem very unfortunate indeed. The whole thing involves the disappearance of at least £5 million from the coffers of the Rory Campbell Syndicate.
That money was supposedly sitting in its accounts as recently as last spring.
Yet the organisation’s roughly 50 members were told just before Christmas that most of their money has somehow vanished, allegedly to Asian bookmakers. They are now out of pocket by the £5 million they originally invested plus any gains over seven years.
People nursing huge financial losses include high-profile figures from the worlds of gambling and horse racing, along with Alastair Campbell and his wife Fiona Millar, who had invested £288,000.
The fallout is already very nasty. One creditor has just initiated legal action at Central London County Court, threatening to bankrupt Rory over a missing £266,000. Several others have compiled a dossier of documents and emails detailing his stewardship of their cash, which they now intend to pass to the police.
There is a growing whiff of political scandal, too. For in November, the Campbell family asked their old chum Lord Falconer – Tony Blair’s ex-flatmate and the former Lord Chancellor – to hold face-to-face meetings with some of the disgruntled creditors, in a bid to negotiate an amicable settlement. That appears to have succeeded only in further inflaming the row.
Alastair Campbell and his wife Fiona Millar, who had invested £288,000 in the football gambling syndicate
‘All the money has disappeared,’ says one aggrieved member. ‘This isn’t a small amount of cash. It’s millions and millions. Campbell has behaved quite disgracefully. Some people have lost a huge proportion of their net worth. They are ruined.’
Matters came to a head in December when Thrings, a law firm representing Rory Campbell, wrote to syndicate members proposing that they enter an arrangement under which he would liquidate a string of personal assets in order to pay back a portion of their debts.
The problem is that this will, at best, see them given less than a third of their cash back, a sum they regard as ‘derisory’.
The creditors are particularly upset at Campbell’s failure, so far, to offer documentary evidence showing where the money ended up. ‘We are just being told by Falconer that it’s gone and we should accept that, and not ask for any proof of how,’ says one. ‘It feels like they are taking us for fools.’
To understand how things came to this we must wind the clock back to 2016 when Campbell – who after completing a degree in PPE at Oxford worked in analysis for a string of football clubs, including Barnet, Cardiff and West Ham (where he operated under former England boss Sam Allardyce) – decided to start a company called C&N Sporting Risk.
It aimed to use ‘extensive and granular’ data about football to carry out ‘predictive modelling’ of the sport, which clients such as bookmakers and elite clubs could pay to access.
There was, however, a second string to the firm’s bow: Campbell would also be using his company’s resources to identify gambling opportunities, placing bets on behalf of a group of financial backers from the worlds of gambling and horse racing.
A quarter of any profits would be paid to C&N as a fee. The Rory Campbell Syndicate was duly formed.
Among the founder members, who each ploughed in anything from £10,000 to £250,000, was a top figure in the British Horseracing Authority, the sport’s governing body, plus two executives from the Racing Post newspaper and one of ITV racing’s well-known presenters. Plus, of course, Rory’s parents.
‘It reads like a Who’s Who of racing,’ is how prominent gambling commentator Tony Calvin, an acquaintance of one investor, described the syndicate. Campbell claimed he could help his clients get rich by using C&N’s modelling to predict the outcome of matches in Europe’s five biggest football leagues. Given his pedigree, a host of relatively sophisticated punters believed him.
‘Rory is a quite charming bloke and a very good mathematician,’ says one member. ‘The theory was that he had data for every player, so when the line-ups for an individual game were announced, he would feed them into a computer. It would then run two million simulations.
‘He compared the probable outcome to the odds being offered. If the market was a certain way out from his simulations, he would have a bet.’
During a normal week of the football season, the syndicate would place between 80 and 100 wagers, for anything between around £3,000 and £30,000 each, a figure which equates to between roughly 0.05 and 0.5 per cent of the fund’s overall size.
‘Sometimes we’d win, sometimes we’d lose, but over the long run it seemed to be making money,’ says the member. ‘Results were then entered into a live Google spreadsheet which everyone could access at any time. It supposedly showed exactly how much money was in the coffers.’
Rory, 37, is an Oxford graduate who parlayed a gift for mathematics into a career as a sort of professional gambler
For a few years, everything seemed to go swimmingly. In its first season, 2017/18, Campbell claimed to have achieved a profit of 10.14 per cent on behalf of investors. The next year, that rose to 12.45 per cent. The year after, during Covid, it was a more modest 4.07 per cent, but over the six years for which it was active, average returns were 8.47 per cent.
Members, whose funds were largely re-invested each year, believed their nest eggs were in safe hands. Indeed, when they logged onto Campbell’s spreadsheet, it suggested that every thousand pounds they originally invested had by 2023 increased to around £1,600. Since gambling returns are not taxable, these profits would also be kept out of the grubby hands of HMRC, too.
That was the theory, at least. But a different picture started to come to light in early 2023, when a syndicate member was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and sought to access some of his loot.
The investor contacted Rory Campbell that May, asking to withdraw £170,000 of the £220,000 he then had invested via the syndicate. He was told it would arrive swiftly. But, in fact, the cash never turned up.
‘Rory kept coming up with poor excuses, saying stuff like, ‘It’s going to be sent’ or ‘I asked them to put it through the other day,’ says a source with knowledge of proceedings. ‘Money was repeatedly promised but never arrived, so he quite soon realised something wasn’t right.’
By November, the syndicate member had run out of patience. ‘I am now reaching the end of my tether and the next step will be for me to start looking at legal options to recover what you owe me,’ reads a WhatsApp he sent to Rory Campbell. ‘I really don’t want to do that but when you continually tell me the money is coming shortly (since July) and December is approaching you can understand why I think you may not be good for it.’
The investor added: ‘Are you going to send some money soon or are you just hoping I die before you need to pay up?’
Rory replied: ‘Absolutely not and yes – very, very soon. All of it.’ But once more no funds arrived. To this day, he remains around £160,000 out of pocket.
Word of the whole thing soon spread to other investors and by early last year, others had begun asking for their money to be repaid. Once more, Rory responded by repeatedly attempting to reassure them.
In April, for example, he claimed there was ‘absolutely no hole’ in the fund, promising ‘everyone will get paid in the summer’. The following month, he changed tack, offered to return 25 per cent of their stake straight away, with the remainder ‘after the Euros’. But by June, he was claiming that ‘issues have arisen’ which meant the cash couldn’t be accessed.
‘As is common in the industry there are differing settling arrangements with agents and accounts and we have had an ongoing issue with settlement this season in one particular situation and there are continuing problems with that,’ reads an email he sent on June 23.
‘This has led to us instructing lawyers to advise on protecting the syndicate’s interests.’
The message cautioned ‘there is the possibility of significant losses. Future payouts will ensure everyone gets treated equally,’ but promised ‘exact timelines of payment tranches’ in the coming days.
Unfortunately, payments came there none. In July, with millions of pounds now outstanding, Campbell changed his tune yet again. On the 18th, he emailed syndicate members to say they might now only receive ‘in the region of 50 to 65 per cent’ of the money they were owed.
Things then went ominously quiet until just before Christmas, when it emerged that the entire venture had more or less collapsed. Lawyers for Campbell at this point alleged that it was not his fault, suggesting that he’d fallen victim to bookmakers in Asia failing to pay their debts.
The explanation baffled investors, since they claim to have been previously told that no more than 5 per cent of the syndicate’s funds would ever be staked with a single bookmaker.
‘Frankly, I don’t now believe a word he says,’ one tells me. ‘The whole thing has gone from Rory claiming nothing was wrong, to saying ‘we’ve a small problem with one or two bookmakers,’ to alleging that about a third to a half of the investments are at risk.
‘Now everything seems to have vanished and he’s offered absolutely no information to show us where its ended up. It feels all smoke and mirrors, and millions of pounds have gone.’
November and December saw two face-to-face meetings between Lord Falconer and senior members of the syndicate. But they ‘achieved precisely nothing’ says a source.
‘The one thing Falconer did clarify is that Alastair Campbell either can’t or won’t write a cheque to sort this whole thing out, for the simple reason that he’s not personally at fault for anything that happened.’
Meanwhile, Rory Campbell appears to have vanished off the face of the Earth. ‘He’s stopped responding to emails. His phone has gone dead. He seems to have gone off the grid and we’ve been sent messages claiming he’s having mental health issues so we mustn’t contact him,’ says one investor. ‘Apparently if we ask where our money is that might make him stressed so we now have to let him vanish.
‘I’m sorry but that’s an utterly disgraceful line to take. There are people in the group for whom the money that has been lost is a huge percentage of their net worth. What about their mental health?’
A spokesman for Rory claims that reports of the syndicate’s implosion are based on ‘an incomplete, distorted and in many regards inaccurate account of a complex set of issues’.
He added: ‘This is part of a briefing campaign aimed at exerting pressure in the middle of what were explicitly agreed to be confidential commercial negotiations.
‘These breaches of confidence led to the withdrawal of an offer made to a group of syndicate members and the rejection of their counter-offer.’
At one point, negotiations appear to have involved heated debate over the future of two London properties in which Rory owns a stake. One, a rental flat in which his equity is valued at £240,000, was to be sold, with the proceeds divided among creditors.
The other, a flat where his brother Calum currently lives (in which there is around £210,000 of equity), was to have been passed to Campbell family members, who are believed to be nursing overall losses of £742,000.
With neither side able to agree who was right during what Rory Campbell has called ‘confidential written exchanges between various parties’, the talks fell apart.
As things stand, somewhere in the region of £5 million has therefore gone up in smoke. Some of the 50 people nursing a loss intend to pass their dossier of information about the whole thing to the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority in the coming days.
What will come of it is anyone’s guess, but Alastair Campbell is for now refusing to comment. This is, perhaps, a scandal too deep for even him to spin a way out of.