Special report: Gordon's last gamble

Nestled among the cafes, clubs and erotic review bars at the heart of London's Soho lies a new kind of NHS service. In this special report, Happy Claptrap talks to Gordon, one of the first patients to seek treatment. His surname has been withheld to protect his privacy.

It's 'faites vos jeux' as the first NHS clinic for gambling addicts opens its shiny new doors on the fourth floor of a walk-in centre in Soho. And politicians say it's an initiative that's long overdue.

"This form of clinic could save the country billions of pounds," Gordon, a 50-something addict being helped by Gamblers Anonymous told Happy Claptrap.

For Gordon, the path to irresponsible gambling began when he and his friend Tony moved to London.

“It all started slowly,” he recalls. “A consultant here, a little bit of deregulation there.

“Then came the PFI initiatives, the off-balance sheet borrowing, the enormous IT contracts. We bet that contractors knew what they were doing.” He shakes his head, looking down ruefully at the floor, lost in unhappy memories. “They didn’t.”

Colleagues of Gordon say he became lost in his own solitary hell. “He was unable to communicate, to have relationships, to relax. He was sullen and would even storm out of meetings because of his consuming obsession,” one unnamed source recalled.

‘Gone in a flash’

And then came the credit crunch, and ‘Gone in a flash’, as he was secretly known to his colleagues , took the biggest gamble of all.

"I stole billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and gambled the lot on one last throw of the dice. Billions of pounds, gone in an instant. I'm not proud of that, but that's the way it was.

"It's the illness of want. I wanted it and I wanted it now. Well then. But it was now at the time,” he continued. “Gambling paints a pretty picture like a holiday in the Bahamas, a stylish designer kitchen, or that new car you’ve had your eye on. I believed that I – that everybody - could have all these things. And once I had gambled my way in, I tried to gamble my way out of it again.”

Will Gordon’s last gamble work? Nobody knows. But at last he has stumbled across his first certainty in over a decade: the realisation that he needs help and finally, there’s a little place in Soho where he can find it. Good luck, Gordon.