The Conservative MP Scott Benton lobbied a minister on behalf of the gambling industry to object to several candidates for the position of chairman of the gambling regulator, documents obtained by The Times reveal.

Benton privately wrote in August 2021 to John Whittingdale, then the gambling minister, to express the “extreme worry and anxiety of the whole gambling industry” about three of the four rumoured candidates for the post of chairman of the Gambling Commission.

The candidate he did not object to, the former Deloitte board member Marcus Boyle, was appointed.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act also show that Benton tried to help secure a better licence for a casino and sent ministers a critique of a University of Oxford study that highlighted perceived health risks to gamblers.

An undercover Times investigation revealed this week that Benton had offered to lobby ministers, table questions and leak a policy document on behalf of an investment fund that proposed paying him thousands of pounds a month.

Benton has been a vocal supporter of the gambling industry since he was elected as the MP for Blackpool South in 2019. In August 2021 he wrote to Whittingdale to express his “utmost concern and alarm and pass on the extreme worry and anxiety of the whole gambling industry” about a rumoured shortlist of candidates for the role of chairman of the Gambling Commission.

He passed on what he said was the industry’s view, that the regulator had been acting “more like an anti-gambling activist group than a regulator” and argued that the candidates were “anti-gambling”.

The MP criticised three of the four candidates. He said Lord Chadlington’s background as a director of an addiction charity was “obviously [having] an impact on him and his views”.

He also took issue with another alleged candidate, Anna van der Gaag, who was chairwoman of the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling. Benton argued that she had turned it into “a politically ideological organisation, bringing in the inherently flawed public health approach to gambling, which is little more than a strategy for reducing the overall amount of gambling as well as demanding that problem gamblers be part of all gambling policy”. He wrote that she had “done more to destroy this industry than many others”.

He also denounced an “unnamed internal candidate” as “fully indoctrinated in the anti-gambling ideology”. Benton argued that the chairman needed to be “neutral” and “evidence-led” and should come from a “non-ideological background”.

Boyle was appointed chairman of the Gambling Commission in September 2021 for a five-year term. A month later, Benton received a response from Chris Philp, who had then taken over the post from Whittingdale, apologising for the delay in replying and saying that Boyle had been appointed after “a fair and open process and we look forward to his neutral and evidence-led leadership of the Gambling Commission during a transformative period in their history”.

Benton did not respond to a request for comment.