If you’re interested in the complexities of the UK Conservative party leadership contest, it’s been quite a weekend. A weekend fuelled by drugs.
David Cameron, one of the Tory leadership contenders, (the youngish good-looking one) has decided that he won’t tell anyone if he’s ever done any drugs. But he has told the press that he had a “normal University life.” We can only guess what that means – and I think Mr Cameron would like us to spend time guessing about him. I reckon it means he smoked a little pot (commonly called cannabis here). If one wants to speculate even more wildly, perhaps he did some other ‘recreational’ drugs. (Mushrooms, Ecstasy, Acid were all pretty popular at the University of Tennessee. I don’t know what they did at Oxford University, perhaps the Vol-in-Law could fill us in.)
The other David running for the Tory top spot, David Davis has said that anyone who has done hard drugs “recently” shouldn’t be considered for a leadership position. I guess I would agree. Anyone who’s in their 40s or over and doesn’t have the sense to stay off cocaine or heroin shouldn’t be party leader or prime minister. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that David Cameron has done blow recently, though. But David Davis has kept up the pressure (see Times Online story) on Mr Cameron. And now there’s a new twist, and it should be beneath me to repeat it, but a) it’s not and b) one of the key actors in the drama has the ‘professional name’ of Mistress Pain which is just so darn colorful.
There’s been much commentary about whether Mr Cameron should or shouldn’t tell all, and if anyone has the right to ask him these questions in the first place. I’m in the camp that thinks what he did at University isn’t terribly relevant (but I would). It’s certainly less relevant than his lack of parliamentary experience (he's served very few years as an MP, but is currently the Shadow Minister for Education).
Tomorrow Conservative MPs start the process of whittling down a leadership candidate list (David Davis, David Cameron, Ken Clarke and Liam Fox) from four to two before it’s put to the Conservative Membership vote. So we’ll see if the drugs debate and/or Mistress Pain affect Mr Cameron’s chances.
Tags: Tories UK politics
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>>I don’t know what they did at Oxford University, perhaps the Vol-in-Law could fill us in<<
Well, in the University College Oxford law class we did red wine, mostly. Molly did nicotine, but she was a wild child. Now the PPE (Politics Philosophy & Economics) people, the nation's future political leaders, were a different story and I strongly suspect "normal" for Cameron means roughly Bill Clinton level of narcotics use.
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