Cameron 'smoked drugs at school'

Readers of this blog will know that I don't have a lot of time for David Cameron. I don't even intensely dislike him, I simply find him irksome and wonder what he actually believes in.

However, today it has been revealed that whilst he was at Eton he indulged in cannabis use.

Conservative leader David Cameron took drugs while he was a pupil at Eton College, a new biography has claimed.

The book, serialised in the Independent on Sunday, says Mr Cameron, then aged 15, was one of several boys caught smoking cannabis at Eton.

He confessed and was grounded. Some of the other boys were expelled.

Suddenly, I find that he's infinitely more interesting than I had previously assumed. I won't go as far as saying that I've changed my opinion of the man but I do find it slightly reassuring that there is a politician who has had a personal life that has some bearing on the experiences of everyone else on the planet.

The Conservative right wing have predictably turned on him.

Former Conservative Party chairman Lord Tebbit told BBC News 24 the claims would not do Mr Cameron much good with Tory activists.

"On the whole, I've always thought that it was better to be pretty honest about things," he said. "Because, sooner or later the truth of the matter tends to come out, and it's always better to have brought it out yourself rather than have somebody else bring it out."

The implication from Tebbit is that Cameron has not been honest, although you'd have to have been pretty dumb not to have worked out that he did indeed have a drug past from his answers to drug related questions during his leadership campaign.

Throughout his leadership campaign in 2005, Mr Cameron declined to answer questions about drug taking when they were put to candidates.

He repeatedly stressed he had a right to a private past and refused to answer them.

Mr Cameron was initially asked at a fringe meeting at the 2005 Conservative party conference if he had ever taken drugs.

He told the meeting he had had a "typical student experience", later adding: "I did lots of things before I came into politics which I shouldn't have done. We all did."

Later that same year on BBC One's Question Time, he said everybody was allowed to "err and stray" in their past.

He told the audience he would not bow to a "media-driven agenda" to "dig into politicians' private lives".

I had always thought his answers on this subject were quite clever as he avoided the Clintonesque, "I never inhaled" answer that was always frankly ludicrous and totally unbelievable.

So now the Tories are being led by a man that has "a past" which, despite having taken place in the hallowed halls of Eton, at least has some bearing on the lifestyle of most Britons; one in three of whom is said to have tried drugs at some point.

Norman Tebbit may be tearing his hair out at this revelation, but to the rest of us Cameron has just succeeded in making the Tories look more relevant than they have for the past decade.

David Cameron is suddenly interesting. Who would have believed it?

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tag: David Cameron, drugs, cannibis, Eton