Down under, there is currently a racing scandal to rank alongside the travails of four British jockeys who have, subject to any appeal, lost their licences.

The problem here in New South Wales is not with thoroughbred racing but with harness racing; what is popularly known, in true Aussie fashion, as ‘The Trots’. What was it DH Lawrence (or was it Orwell?) said about nations divided by a common language? In a series of swoops, some of New South Wales’s owners, trainers and drivers (who are very often one and the same person) have lost their licences or been suspended. Arrests have followed. It all came about when one of the stewards was noticed to have taken up wearing Armani suits and gambling heavily in the Star Casino.

The scam seems to have been that, for a consideration, stewards would waive dope tests on certain trotters. The winning percentage of untested animals is said to have been 80%. Now trotting is known as ‘Crims on Rims’.

Harness racing has always been a sport looked at askance. Over the years there have been a variety of rorts, as they call them in Australia, and these have included electric whips, heavy racing plates, doped animals and ringers (substituted horses) - once or twice even a rung-in driver. The best I heard of, however, came from a greyhound meeting when the favourite failed to leave the traps. An investigation showed sausages had been attached to the roof of its box.

For some reason, trotting has never caught on in Britain. Years ago I did have one client who drove when he wasn’t more profitably occupied and, so the story went, had his licence taken away after he shot out the lights of the stewards’ box at Prestatyn following a disqualification he thought unmerited.

I didn’t act for him on that occasion, if indeed he was ever charged, but Simpson did have a client who was a greyhound trainer at what is now a long defunct track. I forget what the charge was - nothing to do with the dogs themselves - but when we worked out his income, using the Micawber calculation, he was an unhappy man. In theory, every week he was two or three pounds in the red. ‘How do you manage?’ I asked naively. His smile wasn’t exactly beatific, more in the way of shy when he replied: ‘Well, sir. Every two weeks, one of them dogs runs just for me.’

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor