Having once suggested that I would run naked down High Holborn if such a change were effected, I had half a hand on my belt. Following hot on the heels of the news from Australia that Racing Victoria Limited has reverted from a Gross Profits Tax to a Turnover Tax following Racing New South Wales’s victory in the High Court – a decision too depressing on so many levels (not least of which, the medium-term future of their racing industry in the face of competition from other products) for me to have so far succeeded in summoning the will to put pen to paper about it, to be honest – I feared the worst.  Could it really be?

And then I looked closer. And closer. And close as I get, I can’t see for the life of me how it is anything other than a technical change which will do nothing more than increase the admin burden for those already licensed. Unless I’m much mistaken, it won’t add an iota to the on-going, decade-long argument about whether some of Betfair’s customers should be licensed – not, at least, the ones that anyone who either wants or doesn’t want them licensed is worried about.

To explain: the requirement behind what was described to me by a journalist as ‘the triumphalist headline’ appears to be that those licensed bookmakers who use Betfair as a means by which to conduct some of their business have to get a new licence to reflect that peripheral, hedging, part of their trading.

Those who have always argued that “Betfair’s customers should be licensed” want people who are very serious punters to the extent that they look (at a glance) like they are basically acting like a bookmaker in business, licensed as if they were. The debate, therefore, has always been around whether people who use Betfair can conduct a business by virtue of their use of Betfair alone. Betfair argue not; the BHA, William Hill, and Olswang (senders of above-mentioned e-mail) – argue yes, they are.

The change heralded by the e-mail requires people who are already licensed as bookmakers to have a new licence to cover their business activity on Betfair. It doesn’t do anything about the ‘professional punters’ whom Betfair’s opponents in this argument want to capture as if they were bookies.

But Betfair has never disputed that some licensed bookies use them. They’ve argued (1) that it is superfluous to have that set of people required to have an additional licence; and (2) that it is impossible to be in business if you use Betfair alone.

Sure, they’ve lost the first argument, which means that that sub-section of their customers (and not Betfair themselves) have an admin burden today that they didn’t have yesterday. But the real debate is around the second point, and far from this change being ’a vindication of [the bookmakers'] campaign against “unlicensed layers”‘, it doesn’t appear to affect that section of people at all.  Indeed, I can’t see what has changed – other than the requirement for already licensed bookies suddenly to apply for a second badge.

The e-mail states that, “Many traditional bookmakers will see this as an important victory,’ but it’s hard to see why. Far more accurate would appear to be the phrase that precedes it: “This may appear a narrow, esoteric point of detail”.

Sadly, I never got around to it; nor to prefacing this year’s race, which of course has since given massive cause for substantial media comment.  Instead, as I left Cambridge’s celebratory dinner last night, I decided to jot down a few random observations on the day’s proceedings:

1. Should Cambridge have won?

The overwhelming reaction I heard last night was that “Oxford were robbed” – except from the Blue Boat oarsman I sat next to who was absolutely insistent that if the original race had gone to its term, the result would have been the same: “we think we were fitter and stronger than they were, and we’d have come through”.

Maybe, maybe not.  But the extent to which it – and indeed all the previous views I’d heard to the contrary, also mainly from Cambridge men – is irrelevant was summed up by the best speech I’ve heard at a Boat Race dinner in twenty years.  Steve Peel, President of the Cambridge crew which lost in the mutiny year of 1987, said that he had always believed that “on any other day and in any other circumstances, our crew would have won…. But if the race were designed to be fair, it would be raced on a buoyed course over 2000m.  It isn’t.  It’s never been designed to be a fair race: it’s unfair, but equally unfair. And over the years, crews have been unlucky to lose and lucky to win.”

Twice in ten years, a re-start has finished with Oxford losing a race they felt they were coming through to win. Last time, it was an Oxford umpire who called it, and they haven’t invited him back. I can understand them ruing their ill-fortune; and I have enormous sympathy for yesterday’s crew.  But the question above  isn’t “did Cambridge deserve to win?” – it’s “should Cambridge have won?”; and the answer is ‘yes’. That’s the nature of the race, and it would be pointless to blame the swimmer and churlish to blame the man in charge.

2. So did the umpire get it right?

Every Boat Race umpire wants to have a race where nothing much happens, a bit like every Boat Race cox.  You half dream of a scenario where everything goes wrong and you come out the hero having made all the right calls, but in reality, you just want to be logged in the history books having secured the desired outcome.

The thing is that while the public’s attention turns on the umpire – as it does the race – for a single day in a year, in fact everything that happens on the day has been meticulously planned over the course of preceding months.  The race happens to a set of rules, and the parameters within which the umpire can operate are extremely narrow.  A huge number of “what if” scenarios are run through by the Umpires’ Panel, including, last year, the possibility that a protestor should jump in an disrupt the race.  The reaction of the umpire was therefore almost certainly the same reaction that any umpire would have had, because unlike us, none would have been deciding on the spur of the moment.

So, the decision to re-start the race from further upstream, apart from being entirely sensible, was probably one which would have been taken by an umpire from either side.  It had nothing to do with the fact that it gave Cambridge more of a bend in their favour than if they had started from where the boats came to a halt (a point from which they would anyway have drifted on substantially with the tide by the time they got going again), and everything to do with the fact that the objective for the umpire was to have both crews back at race pace and into their stride by the time they went back through the point where they were stopped.

The second incident, with the broken oar, was the cause of far greater controversy, with Oxford’s strokeman telling the umpire within earshot of the television microphones that “you’ve done a great job for your university today”.  But again, in my view, John Garrett made absolutely the right call in over-ruling the appeal against the result.

The rules, as far as I remember them, basically state (in layman’s translation) that the umpire has total discretion in everything, and that once both crews are passed the end of the Fulham Wall (that is, by Craven Cottage), any “equipment failure” is just something you have to cope with unless its failure was caused by the opposing crew being off its station.  Cambridge were quite clearly not that.

“Equipment failure” has totally erroneously come to mean “an early clash” after it occurred in the first minute of the race in 2001. In fact it has nothing to do with clashing at all, but -exactly as the name implies – relates to the equipment somehow failing without impact. But even sticking to the new extended definition, the only defence the Oxford cox had was that the rule about equipment failure actually applies to any clash within the first, say, 50 strokes of an umpire’s start, rather than the start off the stakeboats. Unfortunately for her, it doesn’t.  The clash and breakage were a great shame and caused a huge anticlimax in the context of the racing also having been re-started, but if they had taken place where they did in any race, the outcome would have been the same: the crew that went on to win was not out of its water when the incident occurred, so it was at best, bad luck and at worst, bad judgment.

3. Does that mean it was all the Oxford cox’s fault?

It’s a harsh call, and I feel very bad for her, because as Oxford coach Sean Bowden rightly pointed out, ‘the clash was obviously just one of those extremely unfortunate things’. I’ve seen and been in hundreds of clashes, and never seen a blade broken like that. But as was pointed out to me by the stroke man of my 1995 crew when I arrived at dinner last night, “If you think your crew is faster off the start [which Oxford quite demonstrably were] and are better generally [almost certainly ditto], and you have the biggest bend on the course about to come in your favour [which obviously they did] then why on earth would you fight for every last inch of water?” To emphasize his point, he finished with, “if you’d done that to us, we’d have killed you!”

The cox’s lot is not a happy one: much like a goalkeeper, any mistake you make tends to be high-profile, and costly.  But your primary objective is to give your crew a clear run, and unfortunately, for whatever reason, Zoe de Toledo failed to do that.  As one oarsman said to me yesterday, “it’s nine against nine, and your aim is to go out and break one of them. You don’t care which one it is.”

4. Why do they bother with the Boat Race?

Because of all the hoo-hah, I ended up reading quite a lot of what was being said on Twitter about the Boat Race.   It made for depressing reading, with opinions I have no doubt shared by many readers of this blog. Jack Dee’s contribution congratulating the same two teams on making it to the final might be the oldest joke out there, but it was still re-tweeted several thousand times.

Most of the negative stuff that is said about the Boat Race is demonstrably untrue if you bother to spend more than a few moments to look at the facts, the most obvious of which is that it is rarely an exciting race.  Of course it is true that by the finish, it is always a procession; but that’s the nature of anything where the competitors are not required to be in separate lanes for the duration.  You might as well describe the 1500m or the Marathon as a procession, since the first home is followed inch for inch by whoever is second, some time after crossing the line.

In reality, the races have – increasingly in the last 20 years – been getting closer and closer, with the crews staying head-to-head for longer and longer.  Yesterday, there were serious concerns in the Cambridge camp that they would be beaten inside a minute, and they very nearly were. But having clawed their way back in it, they then slugged it out for the next ten, bow-ball to bow-ball. Whether they were about to be broken by the enormous Barnes bend, we shall never know: psychology would have started to play a major part, had they held on for even half of it, with the pre-race favourites surely likely to doubt themselves and wonder why they couldn’t shake off such supposedly mediocre opposition. Who knows: we might have witnessed one of the great finishes, to match the inch of 2003. Whatever the ‘what if’s, what we saw yesterday and have seen in most contests since the end of Oxford’s dominance in the 1970s and 80s was thrilling racing, and anyone who says otherwise either hasn’t been watching, or, Jack Dee-like, just wants to play to the gallery.

5. The television coverage

I watched the drama unfold yesterday from a launch following the two crews, but when I got home I watched it again on iPlayer, and I was struck by how absolutely outstanding the television production of it was. The camera angles and the close-up shots have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, as has the sound balance which now allows you to hear the coxes all the way through in the background, rather than going to them every now and again, invariably at a moment when they stop saying anything interesting. Yesterday’s coverage, which put you right in the thick of it, was a massive credit to the team behind it.

Sadly, the brilliant production was not, in my view, matched by expert commentary.  I didn’t think the Boat Race’s stalwart Dan Topolski had his finest hour: I thought he spent too much of his time telling us things he wanted us to know, rather than commentating on – and explaining – what was actually happening. At its most extreme, he was still pontificating about the next bend when both crews had stopped some seconds earlier. You can understand his allegiance, but he also seemed more focused on talking Oxford up than on dealing with what had happened, telling us that he thought they were the faster crew on the day, as if that mattered a row of beans (to go back to Peel, above, Topolski should know: he was coaching Oxford that year). And following the clash, he told us that “the umpire is going to have to make a decision”, when the fact that the race was still going made it quite obvious that the umpire had already done just that – and it just happened to be one that he didn’t like. Wayne Pommen, from the launch, called it absolutely right – as he did every time they went to him – in saying that “the umpire feels he was warning Oxford when it happened”, which meant that no foul had occurred.

I thought the rest of the commentary and presentation team did well.  Matthew Pinsent was totally in command, as you’d expect, despite juggling multiple jobs; the novice of the piece (in Boat Race terms), Jonathan Ledgard, I thought did a fine job; and Clare Balding, in what must surely be the most difficult circumstances she will ever have to deal with, was, as always, outstanding. She is total class.

One point, though, I will make – on the basis that I was sent a note by someone suggesting that companies which moved in the last year or so must now feel that they made an expensive mistake. Judging by the reaction of the City as reflected in some gambling share prices, it is a view that is commonly held.

I can’t comment on whether the decision will prove to have made financial sense for Coral, whose re-location was announced in the last month. But I can tell you from experience that companies that made the move before that are likely to be very happy with the decision they made.

Betfair stayed onshore for all of its first decade, to the bemusement of some. In fact, I remember being asked why on earth it didnt leave by a peer and former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who told me that we must be a exceptionally unsavvy not to take advantage of a tax position which could not last forever. Businessmen, he told me, should be driven by numbers, not patriotism.

The eventual decision to move was taken after I left, but it was made on the basis that although my best guess was that a Place of Consumption Tax would be brought in, it would not happen before April 2013. The numbers were therefore crunched calculating that from that date, the costs of being offshore would be the same as being onshore. Net/net, the company would better off providing the new tax didn’t come in before then.

1st December 2014 therefore gives almost two years’ additional benefit. I should think they will have looked at today’s announcement with a smile of some satisfaction.

Luckily, as regards Germany, I was sent an analysis this morning which I think hits the nail on the had as regards why the EC’s letter should be seen as a positive rather than a negative for the gambling industry, so rather than waiting for a time to write – by which time it will be old news – I instead reproduce that analysis below. It is written by Ivor Jones of Numis; and in case you’re wondering, yes, I have asked him if I may! This is what he had to say.

We have now had the opportunity to read the EC letter to Germany in relation to the online gambling treaty proposed by 15 States. The EC makes it clear that the treaty, as amended and including technical details, will have to be properly “notified” to the EC along with evidence which justifies its restrictive elements. The EC makes it clear that the treaty as it currently stands cannot be passed into law.

The process of redrafting the Treaty, getting approval from the States and notifying it to the EC will take months, if it happens at all. We believe that some of the States have expressed dissatisfaction at the restrictive legislation being pursued. Meanwhile, back in Schleswig Holstein, the EC approved regulatory regime is in place and licences are expected to be issued in the next few weeks. We believe the level of regulatory risk in Germany is declining.

I haven’t got round to reading the whole thing, but I did see this in the middle of one paragraph:

Christian Kalb told us that, in France, 1% of gamblers accounted for 50% of the sports betting market. Among these highly active gamblers are people who offer bribes, pathological gamblers, and professionals who may be traders or experts in calculating probabilities. The general idea is to move towards making sports betting in Europe less attractive for these three groups.

I don’t doubt that every statement in the first two sentences is true. I don’t know if 1% of gamblers account for 50% of the sports betting market, but I can believe it. I would also imagine that a large number of those may trade and/or be expert in calculating probabilities. But what of it? Since when is that a bad thing? Do you mean, Mme. Brasseur, that only people who lose should be allowed to play? Alors pourquoi vous ne le dites pas?

It isn’t clear how it is possible to make sports betting “less attractive” for these people  - still less why doing so makes sense. Perhaps Mme. Brasseur intends to recommend a law which makes it impossible for consumers to win money from gambling operators. Whatever her intentions in this area, it will still not be lost many that it is the least troubling part of the paragraph – a distant third place, albeit on a podium of impressive idiocy.

In silver medal position, there is the grouping of the identified groups. Have I really just seen a politician piling crooks, people who are sick, and people who are good at maths into one basket? And in print, where you can’t even say it’s a slip of the tongue? I have to keep re-reading it to believe it.

But the clear gold goes to the astonishing generalisation which renders a technically accurate paragraph absolutely meaningless.

It is bound to be statistically true that a group of perhaps a few thousand serious gamblers – let’s be charitable and say a few hundred, even – will include at least one person who breaks the law and at least ten who have a problem with addiction. Indeed, take any sample of 500 people who do any activity of your choice, and I would imagine it would be true that among them will be some who take bribes, others who have pathological addictions of one sort or another, and others still who have varying expertise and ability – from appallingly bad to really very good indeed –  at maths.

The idea that from that you can extrapolate across the chosen group and label it typical is so daft, and so insulting to the remainder, that it is amazing that anyone, least of all a politician, can say it unchallenged. How is Mme. Brasseur able to get away with it?

Imagine you did very well in business, and earned £10m. You might do it in a year in a bank; or you might help build a business which created a couple of thousand jobs over a decade. Let’s assume, to keep the numbers simple, that you earned it in a year and you were paid it in salary. After income tax and NIC, you would be left with roughly £4m.

If you invested the whole lot in a house, then again, keeping the numbers simple and assuming 5% stamp duty and no other fees, you would be able to buy a house worth £3.8m and the balance would be paid in tax. Anyone who lives in west London knows that you wouldn’t actually get a mansion there for £3.8m – in One Hyde Park, I think you’d get a three-bed flat – but I’m sure it would be very nice; and yes, it could be a castle in Scotland with thousands of acres. What you buy is academic really: the point is that you buy what suits you and your family with what is left of the large amount you earned, on which you had paid all your dues.

Let’s also assume you do this by the age of 40, which is not an unreasonable assumption; and that you therefore live in the house, or one that is comparable to it, for the next fifty years.

If a mansion tax were introduced at 1% of the value of your property, and that property went up by a very marginal 3% a year in value, then over the rest of your life, without earning a bean, you would have to fork out just over £4,450,000 in mansion tax.

That would mean that the total amount of tax you had paid on the £10m you earned in the first place would be £10,650,000 – more than you had actually earned. On what basis is that sensible?

You might think that if you earned £10m over any relatively short period – a year or ten – you might think you could go and do something else with your life other than the job that brought you your wealth. You might want to go and work for a charity, or write a book; or even just put your feet up for a bit. But all this tax would do is force people who had made money to keep their nose to the grindstone, trying to eke out the same earnings that they peaked at. The idea that you could make money and, say, go and become a teacher to give something back to other people would be fanciful. Unless you said, having earned a lot money, that you were not going to do anything with that money in terms of improving your lifestyle and living in a larger house, and instead you were just going to put it in the bank. In that instance, you would lose a percentage of whatever your subsequent gain was, which is fair enough – without it eating into your capital.

Can anyone explain to me what makes it a good idea?

It reminded me of a story which has always amused me in connection with my dad – the sort of story which sits in its own era, and wouldn’t ever happen today. It concerned a match that took place in April 1971 between Leeds and West Brom.

You will no doubt remember the game in question, or at least dad’s commentary line which (in a fairly competitive field) remains one of his most-quoted: “and Leeds will go mad! And they’ve every right to go mad!”  (Personally I prefer the “and the Yorkshire spirit really coming to the fore” that followed a few moments later when there was a wrestling match between police and fans going on in the centre circle, but that’s by the by!)

The key moment in the match occurs 5 mins 55 seconds into the YouTube clip, but in short, the match story was this: Leeds had already had a goal disallowed for offside when West Brom’s Ken Brown, intercepting a pass just inside the  Albion half, actually stopped as he crossed the halfway line expecting the whistle, because Colin Sugget was in an offside position and the flag was waved. But as the Leeds players also stopped the ref waved play on, and Brown ran on and passed  to Jeff Astle, who scored to make it 2-0 to Albion. The match finished 2-1.

So much, so well known. But what amused me was what happened next.

In those days, the match commentator also did the post-match interview, charging down from the gantry following a quick piece-to-camera from the commentary position for the match report.

Dad got there ahead of Don Revie, who arrived for the interview absolutely steaming about referee Ray Tinkler, as you might expect. The decision, after all, is generally considered to have cost Leeds the title.

So Revie arrives, absolutely livid… And dad advises him to go back into the dressing room and calm down before going on air, or he might say something he’ll regret!!!!

I asked him about it the other day and he admitted, “I suppose my action was not exactly that of a journalist… But I knew him quite well at the time.”

I bet Dalglish wishes he’d had the same opportunity to take stock!

In a similar way, I sometimes wonder how come Europe remains in such a financial pickle after all this time, when I take the natural assumption that the people in charge know exactly what they’re doing. And then I see decisions made by EU and soon-to-be-in-the-EU governments about a subject that I do know something about, and I realise that actually they make it up as they go along, with little, if any, weight put on experience and the reality of today’s market.

Take, for example, the news that the Serbians have decided that an ISP block is the way to stop online gaming. Have they been watching anything that’s been going on? Do they talk to anyone who has tried it and seen it fail? What magic bullet do they think they’ve got that hasn’t worked for anyone else?

In Belgium, meanwhile, the ground-breaking news is that they have introduced a blacklist. What, like the Italians had, that everyone got round every week? Surely not? But yes – no joke about it. Perhaps all that was happening during the two years that the Belgians were trying to work out how to form a government? Or is there another excuse?

Their list currently includes ten operators, but the man in charge, Peter Naessens (a name which by coincidence sounds remarkably like ‘no sense’) says that “that could rise to 100 by the end of the year”. I’m sure that will prove effective in the face of the 15,000 sites estimated by the EU to be offering gambling services online (or 20,000 by other counts).

It remains a source of bewilderment to me that this sort of measure can continue to be put in place in the face of mounting evidence that bans are an ineffective means of ensuring that people are properly protected. The latest people to add to the pile are the South Africans, whose National Gambling Board says it is powerless to block sites. So much better, then, to licence operators which can then promote their services in a country. It’s surely not that difficult to understand?