THEY WANT TO SEE YOUR BANK STATEMENTS. THEY WON'T ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS. AND SOMEHOW THIS IS CALLED REGULATION.

Last Saturday, I was doing what any reasonable person does on a wet afternoon in early May, which is to say I was sitting in an armchair with the Racing Post, a large glass of something warming, and the firm intention of losing forty pounds on a horse called Oxagon in the 2,000 Guineas. He was ridden by Oisin Murphy, which should have been a comfort, because Murphy is one of the finest jockeys in the country and a man who makes the rest of us feel inadequate simply by existing. Oxagon travelled well enough, sat beautifully through the early stages, and then, in the final furlong, with the prize apparently within reach, he simply declined to accelerate. He stayed on at the same pace, which is a polite way of saying he ran out of ideas at exactly the wrong moment, like a government minister at a select committee. Sixth. The forty pounds evaporated. And I sat there thinking: this is fine. This is leisure. This is a grown man making a conscious, informed, entirely voluntary decision to hand money to a bookmaker in exchange for approximately four minutes of excitement, and the mild self-loathing that follows.

What I was not thinking, as I tapped my finger against my phone, was that somewhere in an office that smells of lanyards and unread consultation documents, a committee of people I have never voted for was busily deciding whether I was financially fit to do it.

Her name is Baroness Twycross, and she is the Minister for Gambling. I want you to sit with that title for a moment. Minister. For. Gambling. Not Minister for the NHS, which is collapsing. Not Minister for Potholes, of which there are now enough to qualify as a geological feature. Minister for Gambling, a role that appears to exist primarily so that someone can refuse to answer questions from the Racing Post while drawing a salary from the public purse. The Racing Post — which is not, I should point out, a revolutionary pamphlet distributed by anarchists outside Cheltenham — sent perfectly reasonable questions to both the Baroness and the Gambling Commission about the progress of financial risk checks. The so-called "frictionless" variety, which the Commission insists will be invisible and painless, in the way that all government initiatives are invisible and painless right up until the moment they very much aren't.

They got nothing back. A silence so complete you could stable a horse in it.

And then there is Lisa Nandy, who is Culture Secretary and whose Wigan constituency contains the headquarters of the Tote, which means she represents more accumulated racing knowledge per square mile than almost anywhere outside Lambourn. She is therefore, by any reasonable measure, exactly the sort of person who ought to understand that racing is not a pathology. It is a culture. It is form study and breeding lines and going conditions and the entirely rational decision to back a Murphy-ridden favourite at Newmarket on the basis of solid evidence. Life is a gamble, as it happens. Every mortgage, every marriage, every career change, every NHS waiting list — all of it is a wager placed without a guaranteed return. The difference is that when you back Oxagon each-way in the Guineas and he finishes sixth, at least you knew the odds going in.

What nobody in government — not Twycross, not Nandy, not the Gambling Commission in its lanyard-scented fortress — can apparently explain is the central absurdity at the heart of financial risk checks. The theory, as best I can reconstruct it from the avalanche of consultation documents that I have absolutely not read, is that if a regulator can see what you earn and what you spend, it can determine whether your gambling is dangerous. Which sounds almost plausible for about four seconds, until you apply it to reality and it dissolves like a soggy each-way slip.

Because here is the thing. Knowing that a man earns thirty-eight thousand pounds a year and spends two hundred a month on OnlyFans tells you precisely nothing about whether he has a gambling problem. Nothing. It tells you he has a broadband connection and questionable taste in entertainment, but it does not tell you whether he is a disciplined weekend punter who sticks to his limit, or a man in a spiral who is lying to his wife and borrowing from his mother-in-law. Addiction is not a financial pattern. It is a psychological condition. It lives in the gap between what people tell themselves and what they actually do, and no algorithm built on credit reference data has ever successfully located that gap, because that gap does not appear on a bank statement. It appears at two in the morning, staring at a ceiling, after the last race has finished and the app is still open.

The Gambling Commission, for those fortunate enough to have lived their lives without encountering it, exists in a peculiar quantum state — simultaneously everywhere, issuing guidance and consultations and frameworks and strategies, and yet entirely unreachable when someone asks a specific question that requires a specific answer. They have a board. They have a chief executive. They have, one assumes, an enormous building full of people constructing PowerPoint slides about "harm reduction frameworks" and "player-centric affordability journeys." And they cannot find the time to answer a newspaper.

I know what the Guardian will say. They'll say that financial risk checks protect vulnerable people, that problem gambling destroys families, that the Racing Post is simply a lobbying arm of an industry that profits from addiction. And there is, if I'm being honest in the way that large men in armchairs are occasionally forced to be honest, a grain of truth buried in there. Problem gambling is real and it is genuinely grim. But the policy instrument must actually work. And rifling through someone's direct debits to see if they spent forty quid on a webcam subscription does not identify an addict. It identifies a customer. It humiliates the innocent in the theoretical service of catching the guilty, and it does so without the basic democratic courtesy of explaining why.

Because that is what is truly unforgivable here. Not that Twycross might be wrong — though I suspect she is. Not that the policy will cause chaos with the racing industry — though it will. But that she and the Gambling Commission have decided that the hundreds of thousands of people who read the Racing Post, who study the form, who budget their flutter and stick to it with the discipline of someone who has been married long enough to understand financial consequences — those people do not merit an explanation. They are simply to be processed. Assessed. Checked. Frictionlessly.

Oisin Murphy, to his credit, gave Oxagon every possible chance. He sat quietly, asked questions through the reins, and only when the answer came back — sorry, nothing more to give — did he accept the situation with professional grace.

Baroness Twycross and the Gambling Commission could learn something from that. Ask the question. Wait for the answer. And if there isn't one, at least have the decency to say so.