My wife and I visited Sir David Tang in hospital just days before he died from cancer at the age 63.
He seemed agitated, saying: ‘I must make some money for Lucy’ (his much-loved wife).
David was clutching his phone, clearly he wanted to make calls in privacy.
These calls would not have been business transactions. He was addicted gambling, an addiction that plunged him into indebtedness.
Sir David Tang, photographed at Grosvenor House London in 2015, was an amazingly skilled and hospitable figure on London’s social scene
I later discovered that these death-bed calls were just as losing bets.
They did not secure the financial future for the woman he loved, but the reverse.
I am mentioning it now because J.G. Cluff (ex-owner of The Spectator magazine) and former chair of Cluff mineral resources, Cluff Mineral Resources, is also a friend. (‘Algy’) Cluff — who gave Tang his first business job in the early 1980s — has written about the alleged consequences of David’s epic gambling in the latest volume of his memoirs.
‘Unfortunately, it emerged after David’s death,’ he claims, ‘that for many years he had been plundering the assets of various companies without the knowledge of shareholders’.
Fortune
This is a sensation because Sir David was an amazingly skilled and hospitable figure in London’s social scene (and before that, Hong Kong),
He had become a friend of royalty, including both Prince Charles and his ex-wife Diana simultaneously — which was probably a unique accomplishment.
Sir David Tang, considered a friend of royalty after the couple split, was well-acquainted both with Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
His parties would be attended by actors, models, and plutocrats.
The last of these was held at The Dorchester in 2017, when, having been told by his doctors that he had little time left, he invited those he termed ‘500 of my closest friends’ for a memorable dinner.
Not in China Tang, the wonderful restaurant he started in that smartest of London hotels — it would not be large enough — but in the ballroom.
Joanna Lumley was sitting next to me at that dinner and we shared our memories about our amazing host. . . who suddenly stood up to announce that we would now have a performance of his favourite piece of music, Brahms’ first piano concerto.
A complete symphony orchestra was present, as well as Helene Grimaud, a world-famous French pianist.
She sang a magnificent rendition, a kind a anticipatory, dying requiem, but with a host who was beaming and exuberant.
David was more than just a talented pianist. He was also highly cultural: before entering business, he taught English literature and philosophy at Peking University.
After he had made his fortune (or so it seemed) with his Shanghai Tang clothing store chain, David became a notable charitable benefactor — his knighthood was awarded for that.
He had a particular desire to help people with Down’s Syndrome and was a founder of the Hong Kong Down Syndrome Association. As we have a daughter with the condition, he took a great — and touching — interest in her.
Many will be asking how he paid for his charitable donations. But I prefer to make another point. This illustrates how sinister gambling can be to the lives of even the most intelligent and able people.
A medical tribunal in Manchester ruled that Dr Aled Jones, a 39-year-old registrar at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, admitted to fraudulently obtaining £67,420 from the NHS over three years
Last week, there was an even more striking demonstration of this, though it was not widely publicized.
Manchester’s medical tribunal ruled that Dr Aled Jones (39-year-old registrar at nephrology and transplant unit at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff) could continue to practice medicine after he was sentenced to a two-year suspended prison term.
In court, Dr Jones had admitted fraudulently obtaining £67,420 from the NHS, over three years.
This was to finance his gambling habit.
Crazed
When arrested, Dr Jones told the police: ‘I was irrational. I lost all sense of morality.’ Subsequently, he has spoken in public meetings about what it is like to be in the grip of a gambling addiction, and cycled 2,200 miles to raise money for treatment.
Yet if people such as Sir David Tang and Dr Aled Jones are rendered irrational — crazed, even — by gambling addiction, imagine how much more helpless many hundreds of thousands of our less favoured fellow-citizens are, when hooked.
And contemplate how mad it is that we have among the world’s most feebly enforced gambling laws after the industry was ‘liberalised’ by the 2005 Gambling Act under the government of Tony Blair.
It was that measure which licensed an advertising free-for-all — a development all the more bizarre as it coincided with the same administration’s decision to end advertising for cigarettes.
Charles Ritchie and Liz Ritchie founded Gambling With Lives charity. Jack, Jack’s son, died from his gambling addiction.
So just as sports such as snooker were being told they could no longer promote the big tobacco brands (in return for loads of dosh, obviously), football — far and away our most popular sport — was given free licence to become nothing short of an affiliate of the gambling industry.
You might say that while gambling addiction is a wretched matter, with almost 350,000 in this country classed as ‘problem gamblers’, it doesn’t actually kill people.
But it happens: The fatal result is not lung disease, but suicide.
After writing a column in the Mail about a 13-year-old who had run up gambling debts of £80,000 on a series of his father’s credit cards, I was contacted in 2018 by a group of parents with a much worse story to tell.
Their sons had committed suicide.
It wasn’t so much that these young men had been overwhelmed by debts — they weren’t — but that they could no longer cope with the sense that their entire identities had become controlled by online gambling firms, that they couldn’t escape from this . . . Other than by ending it all.
Charles and Liz Ritchie, the parents of Jack, who had committed suicide at the age 24 years, started Gambling With Lives charity.
This month, the Ritchies teamed up with Paul Merson, an ex-footballer in the Premier League, for his BBC1 documentary.
Destructive
Merson told them (and the viewers): ‘I’ve been addicted to alcohol and cocaine, but by far the most destructive and the only one I’m still struggling with is gambling.’
Gambling With Lives demands that all gambling advertising be stopped by the government.
Currently, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is mulling over whether to ask the depressingly large number of professional football clubs sponsored by gambling firms to stop putting the firms’ logos on their players’ shirts.
I agree with the nearly two-thirds of the population who believe that gambling ads should be banned.
Only 14 percent of adults and children polled voted against a total ban.
This legislation would be compatible with a free society in that it would not make gambling illegal.
Premier League footballer Paul Merson in his BBC1 documentary on this topic said: ‘I’ve been addicted to alcohol and cocaine, but by far the most destructive and the only one I’m still struggling with is gambling.’
It is completely banned in China’s Communist autocracy, where David Tang used to teach.
However, this hasn’t stopped the establishment of a huge illegal online gambling industry.
Chinese seem to have a penchant to gamble: I recall that David Tang took us to the Sha-Tin track in Hong Kong 1997. On the one night we were there, more than a billion Hong Kong dollars had been wagered. To loud cheers, that number was actually announced.
It’s ironic, then, that Chinese are now concerned about the gambling temptations that their students will face at our universities. A recent article in the South China Morning Post was headlined, ‘Why Chinese students are at risk of becoming gambling addicts in the UK’.
If that doesn’t make us feel ashamed at the change in this country, it should.