What are they smoking? Politicians have always dabbled in drugs

The revelation – if that’s the word – that traces of cocaine have been found throughout parliament and the government’s latest skirmish in the unending war on drugs, has naturally focused attention on the recreational habits of our rulers. The new “10-year strategy” against so-called county lines and drug abuse has the great advantage, from Boris Johnson’s point of view, of stretching far beyond any realistic expectation of his time in office. Indeed, he might not last another 10 weeks at this rate.

Having pretended to “get Brexit done” and failed, and pretended to “flatten the sombrero” of the pandemic, and failed, the prime minister now wants to pretend to win the war on drugs. He’s thinking about taking drug peddlers’ driving licences or passports away, that sort of thing, so serious does he think the problem: “Drugs are driving a lot of misery and we can fix it. They’re not going to make you happier. They’re not going to make you more successful. They’re not going to make you cooler. They’re bad news.”

Johnson declares that “the country is littered with victims of what’s happened”. Arguably, he too is a “victim”, because he has freely confessed to doing drugs in the past, albeit with some Johnsonian obfuscatory jokes attached and with a certain inconsistency; whether his experiences did him any harm is another question.

In the past, he certainly didn’t seem to think that consuming illegal substances was much of a deal. Challenged about it 15 years ago, he quipped “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.”

Later, in 2007 he told GQ magazine: “I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. And it achieved no pharmacological, psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.” In 2008, when running to be mayor of drug-fuelled London he first minimised and then denied his previous accounts: “Well, that was when I was 19. It all goes to show that, sometimes, it’s better not to say anything.” Days later he reversed his ferret: “To say that I have taken cocaine is simply untrue. As I have said many times, I was once at university offered a white substance, none of which went up my nose and I have no idea whether it was cocaine or not.”

Back in his freewheeling days as a newspaper journalist and libertarian he expressed the view (in 2000) that the-then Blair government was getting out of touch with people’s behaviour, and wondered out loud why his “respectable neighbours who roll up a spliff and quietly smoke it together” are “in breach of the law”.

The story of politicians’ complex relationship with “recreational” drugs is as long and untidy as the most comically constructed undergraduate spoof. The definitive statement on cannabis use was that offered up by Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election campaign. Famously it has been mocked ever since as the “I didn’t inhale” excuse, with a nod and smirk, but, being Clinton, it was in fact a more elaborately designed exercise in lawyerly evasion (though no less worthy of derision): “I’ve never broken a state law. But when I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale it, and never tried it again.”

He’s not the first president to have used drugs. George Washington used laudanum (an opiate) for pain relief; Abraham Lincoln tried a mysterious “blue pill” to liven things up, possibly some sort of mercury concoction.

Clinton’s line was ridiculed by many since, including Barack Obama in 2008 who pointed out that inhaling was kinda the point of the exercise; competitive as politicians tend to be, he moved a class above Clinton by conceding to having used a “bit of blow” (cocaine). Donald Trump seems not to have used marijuana because “you lose IQ points”, and they are very precious to him. Joe Biden? Perhaps surprisingly he’s not said he’s used it, and he has a zero-tolerance policy on drugs at the White House, or White Powder House, and has fired staffers for drug abuse. He does not, though, incline towards decriminalisation.

In Britain, the Clinton doctrine has generally been followed by politicians on the make, and it has done them little zero harm career-wise. When Michael Gove fessed up to cocaine use in 2016, for example, he was probably going to lose to Theresa May in any case. The same would also go for Rory Stewart’s near-boast about smoking opium out in Afghanistan and Iran, like some Edwardian adventurer, as supposed to smoking some lines of coke adulterated with Vim and baking powder in the bigs at the Groucho Club.

Indeed it is pretty much normal now for prominent politicians to admit to their youthful indiscretions, which they routinely now deeply regret and have never repeated. It was the kind of formula deployed by David Cameron and George Osborne, for example, in their rise to greatness – it was all behind them and it’s private anyhow. But of course! Yvette Cooper, now near the front line of the war on drugs as shadow home secretary, was the first serving cabinet minister to admit past use, in 2007. Andy Burnham, Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Alistair Darling, Harriet Harman – all have got ripped off their tits on dope or some such in the dim and distant past before public service came-a-calling. Johnny Mercer answered a query about illegal drugs with the enigmatic “You’ve seen the advert. You don’t put diesel in a Ferrari, do you, mate?” As for Sir Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions could hardly admit to breaking the law, so he confines himself to a knowing “we had a good time”. Make of that what you will.

Fully a third of William Hague’s shadow cabinet jauntily owned up to smoking dope in 2000 just to annoy Ann Widdecombe and send her into a kind of enraged trance on the Ten O’Clock News. Surprisingly, you might say, Tony Blair, the louche-looking, long-haired, laid-back lead singer of the Ugly Rumours rock group at Oxford says he didn’t do any drugs because his dad told him not to, which, if true, is one of the few touching anecdotes about the man.

In the same way, the really shocking stories nowadays would be if some contemporary had seen Theresa May trying to flog LSD around the junior common room at St Hugh’s College, John Major chasing the dragon, or Jacob Rees-Mogg lovingly off his head on ecstasy. In that way, the award for the most unexpected drugs fiend goes to Norman Lamont, now Lord Lamont of Lerwick, former chancellor of the exchequer, who once tried “space cake” and pronounced it most satisfactory. It was probably at that moment that the war on drugs was lost.