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It’s an ideal link-up,” he said.Racing and casinos have the same aura of money and glamour, and many of the same patrons. The four London-based Grosvenor gambling clubs have an overseas membership of nearly three-quarters, of which a large proportion are eminent Emirates nationals, and the group has already sponsored racing at Jebel Ali in Dubai.David Boden, Grosvenor’s managing director, is delighted that some of the Turf’s mystique is to be dispensed in his clients’ direction. ”I reckon I spend pounds 5 million a year running my operation worldwide and, while sponsorship is not absolutely necessary to carry on, with prize money in this country returning only 26 per cent this will certainly help.”
Fittingly, the deal was announced on the second anniversary of the British Horseracing Board’s innovative Sponsorship Framework for Racehorse Owners, pushing the amount raised to more than pounds 5m.Sangster, a member of Grosvenor’s flagship London club, the Clermont, for more than 30 years, has been out hustling for a backer from the moment it was permitted, approaching several companies including Cartier, Piaget and Courage. Robert Sangster, one of racing’s shrewdest operators, clinched the sport’s most valuable sponsorship so far when he signed a pounds 500,000 deal yesterday with Grosvenor Casinos. For the next three years – starting on Diamond Day at Ascot on 27 July – the famous blue and green Sangster silks will carry the logo of Britain’s largest casino operators. It sounds like a gambling marriage made in heaven, and both parties expressed themselves content after taking their vows at Manton, the historic Wiltshire headquarters of Sangster’s Swettenham Stud operation. Haggas said: ”I would like to win a Group One race with him over the shorter distance, but we will play it by ear, depending on how long it takes him to get over his foot problem.”Ladbrokes, the first to bet on the Irish Derby, have promoted Derby runner- up Dushyantor to favouritism at 6-4, with the one-time Derby favourite Dr Massini, who missed Epsom because of a minor injury, 2-1 and fifth- placed Alhaarth 9-2.Peter Chapple-Hyam had been in two minds about running his French Derby runner-up Polaris Flight, an 8-1 shot, but two factors – the injury to Shaamit and the fact that the colt was sold for a large sum to a Saudi prince over the weekend – mean he will take his chance.The Irish have won their local Derby only once in the past 10 years (with St Jovite in 1992) and the home side’s defence looks weak again this year, with Rainbow Blues, second in the 2,000 Guineas at the Curragh, the first in the betting at 20-1..

With Shaamit it was just one of those unfortunate things but it is only a short-term setback.”The trainer, trying to salvage a bright side, added: “I suppose it is better that it happened when it did, as we have saved ourselves the pounds 60,000 supplementary fee But it’s Sod’s Law. I spent most of Sunday telling everyone how well he was and now I have to turn round and say this.”Shaamit, owned by Khalifa Dasmal, will now be prepared either for the Eclipse Stakes, a step back to 10 furlongs, in 10 days’ time, or the King George and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at the end of July. He was almost right again by the evening and will probably be sound again by Wednesday. But you can’t go into a race like this one at half-cock.”
The cause of the mishap is a mystery, but prolonged dry weather can affect horses’ hooves (the horny walls of which comprise around 25 per cent water) making them dry out and become a less solid fixture for horse-shoe nails. Shaamit’s sire Mtoto had a long history of problems with his shelly feet.Haggas recalled: ”Yeast did exactly the same thing with a shoe in the winner’s enclosure after he won at Ascot but he was lucky enough for a nail not to touch the tender part of his foot. Just 24 hours after giving the go-ahead for the Epsom Derby hero to be entered for the Curragh Classic at today’s supplementary stage, the colt’s desperately disappointed trainer William Haggas had to break the news that his star was lame. ”He shifted the shoe on his foot which made it sore,” Haggas said yesterday: ”We found it at evening stables on Sunday night, and we took the shoe off and applied a poultice.

Irish Derby favourite Shaamit will miss Sunday’s race after sustaining a foot injury in his stable. This may mean confronting Scottish Labour MPs with some hard choices. But he will at least have allies among those impatient activists who do not want to see the impact of the first Labour government for 17 years on the fabric of ordinary life in Britain lost in the legislative quagmire that will threaten a Scotland Bill which can’t be passed or made to work.. But whether Mr Blair goes down that route or another, he is determined to come up with some kind of answer.The third aspect that, it is safe to assume, is currently absorbing Mr Blair concerns whether Labour’s plan will require a referendum in Scotland. The assumption so far has been that the general election will be enough of a mandate.

But both the left think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research and, more guardedly, today’s Constitution Unit report suggest that a referendum could go a long way towards entrenching public support for, and understanding of, the Scottish Parliament. This will be heresy to some Labour Scots, of course, who are convinced it isn’t necessary: but if it isn’t, what is there to fear?The anti-home-rule Dalyell will try to whip up Labour support for the referendum clause that will certainly be tabled by the Tories if Labour’s Bill doesn’t include one. More importantly, with Labour committed to a referendum on change in the electoral system, and quasi-committed to one in the event of a decision to join a single currency, can it really sustain the argument against holding one for the biggest change in the history of the Union – especially when Blair is confident that a referendum would be won by the home rulers?Blair is said to believe that every attempted home rule measure in the past has foundered either because it was too ambitious, or because it was not seen to command full consent, or both He is determined to see this one work. One possibility is to preclude Scottish MPs from voting on English-only business. Contrary to most Labour mythology, this would not necessarily leave a Tory majority in charge of English business, since, as the report points out, whenever Labour has had a convincing majority in the UK, it had had a majority of English MPs, too. I would not now be in the least surprised if Mr Blair goes into the next election pledging that the Scottish Parliament will not have tax powers, at least during a first Labour term.On the West Lothian question and the related question of whether the relative over-representation of Scottish MPs at Westminster should be curbed by reducing their number from 72 to 59, the answer is less clear. So far Labour has argued determinedly that the tax-raising powers are much less threatening than they first appear, making the point that these powers might never be used.

In the words of a report from the independent Constitution Unit, published today: “The difficulty of raising direct taxation in an environment where there will always be an election in the offing, either in the UK or in Scotland, should not be underestimated.” But there was a marked silence from Labour’s rebuttal-prone media spokesmen when the Scotsman reported last month that Mr Blair was coming under pressure from his own ranks to shelve the tax-raising powers. What right, they will ask, has Mr Brown, a Scottish MP, to fix as Chancellor tax levels for England and Wales which may not be, because of the Scottish Parliament’s tax-raising powers, the final rates for his own constituents in Dunfermline East?All of which helps to explain why Blair is now doing some hard thinking ahead of publication of Labour’s Road to the Manifesto on Thursday week. He is also determined to find workable answers to the objections that behind the scenes, for several months now, he has been pressing his Scottish colleagues to confront.Blair is determine to maximise consent for home rule on both sides of the border. As a party leader who has converted his party away from tax- and-spend, he isn’t (and can’t be) wholly comfortable with the leeway a Scottish Parliament will have to raise additional taxes of up to 3p in the pound. And unlike many home rulers, he doesn’t dismiss outright the West Lothian Question famously raised, again and again, by Tam Dalyell during the fateful passage of the Scotland Bill in 1977-78.If Scottish issues were to be decided in an Edinburgh Parliament, what right would Scottish MPs have to debate and vote in the House of Commons on legislation that concerned only England and Wales? Or, as Balfour asked about similar proposals, in 1914, “Are you going to leave the whole of these 72 Scottish members here to manage English education?Blair is almost certainly conscious that one trick the Tories are planning is to make a combination of the two problems – tax powers and the West Lothian question – converge on the single figure of Gordon Brown, the Shadow Chancellor. The implication will be that there is nothing a Scottish Parliament or a Welsh assembly can do that an evolving Westminster one could not do better.Tony Blair is committed to devolution though he personally shares some of Kinnock’s reservations; and it certainly isn’t the overriding priority it was for John Smith.