Keep quiet on drugs, Portillo tells Cameron
As a member of the Labour Party, any utterings of mine on the Tory Leadership campaign should be taken in that context.
I will say that I am virulently anti-Class A Drugs, and have never taken any. I suspect that makes me relatively unusual. It just wasn't done - too expensive - in my circle, at the age when I might have been tempted. Subsequently, I have seen too many lives fucked up - people who thought that the occasional Saturday night dabbling wouldn't do them any harm.
David Cameron has not admitted to taking drugs. The fact that he appears not to have issued a categorical denial has led commentators to assume and speculate that he probably has.
I can't help thinking: what's the big deal? Granted, it won't go down too well with the Blue-rinse matrons in the Shires. But for the Tory Party to succeed electorally, they have to appeal to a demographic of under-45s who were brought up to be Conservatives, and are reasonably prosperous, although anxious about housing costs, education and pensions. Many of them have not been voting Tory. Many of them will have been, or may well still be, occasional Saturday night cocaine dabblers. They are exactly the sort of people who would vote for a Cameron-led Conservative Party. Not because of a drugs history, or even despite it. I suspect, for many of them, it would be of no more consequence than learning that he had pre-marital sex. (Whether he did or not I don't know and don't care, and obviously the media knows it would be a laughing stock if it even asked that question.)
I do find it profoundly sad that Portillo says that his acknowledgement of a homosexual past was the beginning of a media witch-hunt. I am not a fan of Cameron or Portillo, but I am appalled at the media coverage of their (pre-politics) private life. It was clear from the Kate Moss business that large swathes of the national Press regard drug taking as 'normal'. The hypocrisy is staggering. What the British public needs is a robust examination of David Cameron's philosophy, policies and track record as an MP, not scandalmongering about the night he had one pint too many and walked back to his student digs with a traffic cone on his head, or whatever.
And of course, many of those blue-rinse matrons of the Shires are the mothers of the prosperous cocaine-dabbling urbanites who 'ought' to be voting Tory and are not.
It's not an issue that will go away. At the moment the spotlight is on Cameron. I would guess that it probably won't yet fall on Labour Politicians of the same age group - Milliband, Kelly etc - because they would probably have been like me at Uni, not mixing with the super-rich, not being able to afford cocaine in those days, when it was expensive. But it will fall on the next tranche, including many not yet even on the candidates list.
Despite what Portillo says, I think, if Cameron has taken hard drugs, he should say so, and move on. My issue about Portillo and the homosexuality was the years he spent denying it (his business) and the years as Defence Secretary he spent refusing to legalise homosexuality in the Armed Forces (many people's lives ruined). When a friend was PVd for MoD work, her Vetter asked me one question about her drugs use and asked me in a dozen different ways, verging on pervyness, whether there was any hint whatsoever that she might at any time have harboured the slightest passing eensy-weensy homosexual urge. She got the PV despite admitting to occasional pot smoking. I suspect one drunken same-sex snog would have been the kybosh. This was when Portillo was Defence Secretary.
PS Am I getting old or is Norman Tebbitt getting old. For the first time, ever, I agree wholeheartedly what he has to say
I think it matters very little if it's merely a question of having tried the odd bit of cannabis at university 20 or 30 years ago. If it's any deeper than that, then the public should know, because that might affect their attitude towards drug control. A prolonged time using a Class A drug is a matter that might reflect on the individual in a way that isn't the case with someone who experimented at university.You can't make a general rule on whether it makes them unfit for office. A friend of mine received treatment for cocaine addiction some years ago and is now a model citizen. People have been down the road and dug themselves out of it. Were that to be true of someone in public life, people tend to admire rather despise them.
Or is it that Tebbitt and I have not changed, but the answer is so self-evident that people as disparate as he and I can agree on it?
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