In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’
There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said that the Scottish government should ‘face up to the situation they are in and double down on recruitment efforts’. I think she just meant double.
Double down is a phrase from blackjack, an American casino card game resembling pontoon. It entails a player doubling his stake in return for only one more card from the dealer. It is not just the behaviour of degenerate gamblers. By the laws of statistics, it is right to double down if, for example, you have a six and a five and the dealer shows a jack (a knave as Estella would call it).
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