A former colleague of mine had a distressing habit. They would pull up a tab on their work computer and start betting on an online gambling platform. Initially, they started out with sports they liked, but then they quickly branched out. They had no problem betting on a horse race they had never heard of, on a horse that they had never seen. They would spend the working day flicking back and forth between their email and that one tab.

They weren’t alone. Almost everyone knows someone affected, whether family member, friend, or acquaintance. The person who is compulsively attracted to the quiz machine at the pub, or the coin pushers at a seaside pier or the slot machines at the euphemistically-named high street “adult gaming centre”. Once a friend’s coach trip out of London was abruptly paused because the driver had to make a rest stop – they found him hunched over the fruit machines in the service station.

Gambling is all around us. It’s in the way we routinely talk about actors and political candidates being “bookies’ favourite” to win. It’s in the corner shop down the street, where you can buy a scratch card and a lottery ticket. Gambling addiction – the type that ruins lives and bankrupts people – is far less visible. It thrives in secrecy, away from public view. Tragically, it has been supercharged by the accessibility of online gambling on our phones and computers.

Nobody has done more in Britain to bring gambling out of the betting shop and into our everyday lives than Denise Coates, the boss of gambling giant Bet365. You might associate billion-dollar businesses like hers with the glittering high-roller casinos of Las Vegas or Monaco, not a car park portable cabin in Stoke-on-Trent – but that is exactly where Coates began her rise to becoming one of Britain’s richest women. The daughter of Peter Coates, a Stoke City Football Club director and Provincial Racing owner, she took over her father’s small chain of betting shops in the 90s and expanded their 12 pokey “pretty........

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