Horse racing

The mission was simple: take a load of garden refuse to the council dump and be back in time to drive Mrs Oakley to an urgent appointment in Oxford. On my return, there was no Mrs Oakley in sight. Strange, since she is the sort who will camp out at the station the evening before to catch a 9 a.m. train. She had a house key; I didn’t. Half an hour of fretting later, as I mounted a ladder to peer through the bathroom window for fear she might have slipped over and knocked herself out, an enraged Mrs Oakley appeared beneath me. She had frozen stiff on the nearby bridge, where she had walked to cut me off on the only route home to save us motoring time.

Racing is an expensive sport to stage. Courses and grandstands have to be maintained, health and safety regulations have to be observed. Human and horse ambulances have to be provided, turnstiles have to be manned and, to maintain the ‘integrity’ of a much gambled-on sport, stables have to be guarded, and photo-finish and race-patrol cameras have to be provided. Recognising this, as they sought to clean up gambling laws in the 1960s, our politicians introduced a rare example of ring-fenced taxation: they sanctioned a levy system on bookmakers to make them responsible for producing a significant contribution to racing’s costs. By 1978 the Gambling Commission was complaining that racing had become ‘addicted to subsidy’.

Racing moves off the back pages only when its opponents have bad news to gloat over. Two examples lately have been the disciplining of Irish jump jockey Davy Russell for striking a wayward horse, and the death of the Flat-racer Permian, trained in Yorkshire by Mark Johnston, after he broke a leg as he crossed the finishing line at Arlington Park in Illinois. The Russell saga reminded me of the morality tale of the frozen bird in a Russian forest that falls from the sky exhausted. A kindly hunter places the tiny creature inside his fur jacket, where it thaws. Anxious to carry on his shooting, the hunter spots a heap of still-steaming elk dung and places the creature in it to continue its recovery. Restored to health, the rescued bird sits up and sings joyously.

Having spent three quarters of my life covering politics and the other quarter following racing, I am often asked what the two have in common. One answer is that politicians are often gamblers. David Cameron tried to solve his party’s divisions over Europe by launching the Brexit referendum and failed spectacularly when an irritated electorate overturned the odds. Despite having a workable majority, Theresa May bet the Tory farm on a snap election seeking to increase it and she, too, lost on an apparent certainty. Playing party political games with the nation’s future, neither deserved any better. Certainly, I find few in racing who believe that Brexit, especially May’s beloved ‘hard Brexit’, is going to help them.

Back on the political beat with CNN for the general election, I was reminded how politics is now dominated by personality, or the lack of it. Led by the media, we want our politicians to be authoritative enough to dominate an EU summit yet ‘normal’ enough to know what’s topping the pop charts or who’s in the final of Strictly Come Dancing. It has led to idiocies such as Gordon Brown pretending he listened to the Arctic Monkeys or an ingratiating David Cameron claiming to have voted for Will Young on X Factor at his daughter’s insistence when Young was actually on Pop Idol, which he won before Cameron’s daughter was born.

Nobody I know has ever been interviewed by an opinion pollster. Nor do I ever encounter anybody who has won one of those holidays in the Bahamas we are encouraged to enter competitions for every time we open a crisp packet or pull the tab off a soft-drink can. I used to be equally sceptical of claims that bookmakers lost between £15 million and £20 million on 28 September 1996, the day Frankie Dettori rode all seven winners on the Ascot cards. I know plenty of people who bet on horses, but none who lay out seven-horse accumulators on a single jockey’s rides. This week I am a little less sceptical.

Most racehorse trainers, those at least who didn’t have a legacy from Aunt Agatha to lubricate their way into the business, have attended the School of Hard Knocks, their tutors including some famously celebrated deliverers of colourful reprimands. Think Gordon W. Richards or Barry Hills. Having worked for Jenny Pitman and served eight years as assistant to the seemingly almost permanently incandescent Mick Channon, Joe Tuite, a Lambourn trainer in his own right since 2010, probably has the ultimate degree in bollockings. He was one of five stable lads who on one famous occasion misheard Jenny Pitman’s instructions.

Any of us can forget little things on leaving home in a hurry. To the chagrin of Mrs Oakley, who might need a pint of milk or a few more tonics on my way home, my mobile phone and I don’t always arrive at the races together. In that regard I have long sympathised with the former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke. He regularly left his government-issue model at home (especially when heading for a day’s cricket) complaining, ‘The trouble with mobile phones is that sometimes people call you on them.’ I even forgot my wallet one day en route to Ascot and had to borrow my day’s staking money from the esteemed financial editor Jeff Randall.

Every Grand National reminds me of a hero of my youth: Beltrán Alfonso Osorio y Díez de Rivera, the 18th Duke of Alburquerque, a Spanish amateur rider who became obsessed with the race but whose only entry in the record books is for breaking more bones in competing in the National than anybody else. I have spent much of the past year working with Edward Gillespie — managing director of Cheltenham for 32 years and the impresario supreme of its springtime Festival — on a book recording the highlights of jump racing over the past 60 years. It was Edward who unearthed an Alburquerque story I had not heard. In 1974, having just recovered from a broken leg, the Iron Duke smashed his collarbone and rode at Aintree in a plaster cast.

Aintree’s Grand National festival is well underway, with the ladies of Liverpool making the most of the unseasonably warm weather. It’s not just the champagne bars that will be doing well for themselves, though. The nation’s bookies also benefit hugely from today's Grand National race; it’s estimated that a quarter of the UK’s adult population will have a punt on it. The thing with the National is that with so many horses taking part, how on earth can you choose a winner? When there are 12 or so in a flat race, the probability of picking a winner is much higher. But with 40 horses to choose from, and the course so challenging, it’s a much harder task. Many people have one tried and trusted way of picking their horse. Some choose by colour.

Bookmaker Paddy Power once famously declared, ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ This year it seemed that the whole place was in danger of being enveloped in Irish tricolours. Irish-trained horses won 19 races compared with the mere nine taken by horses trained in England. Willie Mullins, despite drawing a blank on the first two days and seeing the previously unbeaten Douvan vanquished thanks to injury, still trained six but was beaten to the Festival championship by Gordon Elliott with another six victories and more second places. With Sizing John’s Gold Cup victory, plus two more, Jessica Harrington became the most successful female Festival trainer ever.

If the championship for training jumpers went to a set of gallops rather than to a trainer it would not be Paul Nicholls’s Ditcheat precipice nor Nicky Henderson’s historic Seven Barrows facilities outside Lambourn or even Colin Tizzard’s Venn Farm on the Dorset border in the lead: the prize would go to the two stiff gallops, against the collar all the way, at Grange Hill Farm, Naunton, in the heart of the Cotswolds and just 12 miles from the Cheltenham course that has been the focus of the jumping world these past four days. The gallops are used by both Nigel Twiston-Davies, the proprietor of Grange Hill Farm, and by this season’s fastest-advancing handler Fergal O’Brien, who turns out his horses from the Upper Yard, which is the other side of the road.

The drumbeats are quickening ahead of the Cheltenham Festival and at this stage there really is no substitute for going racing. Some might have ducked Newbury’s Betfair Hurdle meeting on Saturday because of the bitter wind, which made a hot-water bottle the most prized object on the winner’s rostrum, and because the other two key races on the card were reduced to three and four runners. More fool them. Both produced intriguing contests and vital clues for the Festival. An earnest statistician once asked a northern trainer what the crucial signs were that told her when one of her horses was ready to win a race. She replied, ‘Just one. A grin on my husband’s face after he comes in from the gallops.

You had to feel for ITV’s new racing team on their opening day at Cheltenham. It was cold, wet and utterly miserable but they opted not to take refuge in a warm studio but to stay close to the action under their brollies, putting a brave face on things. During what I nowadays look back on as my misspent youth as BBC political editor, I once did the same. As I began a live interview for the Nine O’Clock News from an outside balcony at a Labour party conference, bursting to reveal some exclusive information, the heavens opened. I was drenched within 30 seconds but continued, only for the newscaster to cut me off after just one question with a brisk ‘Thank you, Robin Oakley in Brighton.’ Furious, I called the programme editor: ‘What the hell were you doing?

It is a long time since I spent a morning on the gallops with the footballer-turned-racehorse trainer Mick Channon (he was in Lambourn at the time), but it proved an education for me and for two inappropriately dressed young owner’s daughters who also turned up. Their vocabularies were extended considerably. National Treasure though he became, as one of our great footballers, Mick Channon the trainer is expletive-driven and easily angered to a Basil Fawlty level, which is disheartening for the jockeys and apprentices he often fires at roughly fortnightly intervals, who are still there the next week. His default mood is somewhere on the downside of grumpy.

Talking to Paul Nicholls earlier this season, I was shaken to hear the ultra-competitive champion trainer say that he wouldn’t want to be starting again now. If younger trainers are to get to the top they need somewhere they can train a hundred horses from, he said. ‘You need to be in the right place with the right opportunity. It’s very, very tough.’ Two young trainers most would back to make it are former Nicholls assistants Harry Fry and Dan Skelton, and the other major figure whose former assistants are making their mark is Nicky Henderson. Those who have graduated in recent years from Nicky’s Seven Barrows equine finishing school include Charlie Longsdon, Tom Symonds, Jamie Snowden and Ben Pauling.

‘A more thrilling, uplifting, glorious way of living has yet to be invented,’ the jockey John Francome said of National Hunt racing. Watching last weekend’s action from Cheltenham racecourse, it was easy to see what he meant. Now is when the National Hunt — or jump — season really gets under way. The summer months are about flat racing, although these days flat racing goes on through the winter, too. There are now six all-weather racetracks in the UK; the latest, Newcastle, opened earlier this year. Of course, it’s not quite the same (floodlights are no replacement for long summer evenings), but it does enable flat horses, trainers and jockeys to stay in business all year round. For most racing aficionados, winter is about the jumps.

When Theresa May came to power the Turf community was full of hope. Had she not been, if only briefly and in partnership, a racehorse-owner herself? Perhaps, then, she might revive the question Margaret Thatcher used to put to her ministers about any intended senior appointment in Whitehall: ‘One of us?’ Sadly, those early hopes are evaporating fast. It is not just that the pound’s collapse since she confirmed that Brexit means Brexit has given foreign owners a 20 per cent advantage at the bloodstock sales. It is fear of the government’s puritanical streak, a streak that has led to a new gambling review and the suggestion that ministers are minded to ban advertisements for gambling before 9 p.m.