Image by Peter Reynolds
https://peter-reynolds.co.uk/2019/06/01/which-conservative-leadership-candidate-has-the-intelligence-and-courage-to-legalise-cannabis/
I look at the race to succeed Theresa May as Tory leader and I wonder, to modify our Sunday Poem, where are the squares of yesteryear? No Conservative seeking to maintain political viability wants to seem too disconnected from the debauchery of contemporary Britain. So it has become the habit to confess to “youthful indiscretions”, “youthful” being a term of art stretching easily into late middle age.
This time round the craze is for drug-fiend Tories. Of this week’s crop of alleged leadership contenders, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt says he had a cannabis lassi while backpacking in India; International Development Secretary Rory Stewart admits he puffed on an opium pipe at an Iranian wedding; my old boss Boris Johnson claims to have snorted icing sugar at Oxford; former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab discloses he’s tried cannabis but never any “Class A drugs”; and, just to put the hallucinogenic icing on the psychotropic trifle, the Environment Secretary Michael Gove reveals he only does “Class A drugs”.
Mr Gove purports to have taken cocaine as a “young journalist” twenty years ago – that’s to say, when he was in his thirties and working for The Times. He applied for a job round about that time at a publication for which I then wrote, and the chum of mine who took the interview reported back that Gove was one of the most boring men he’d ever had the misfortune to sit through lunch with. If he was snorting in the bog between the soup and fish, it evidently didn’t add any sparkle to his repartee. For American readers, the notion of Michael Gove as a cokehead is roughly analogous to discovering Mike Pence spends his weekends in a gay leather bar: It renders the very concept of transgression pointless. Given what he’s like on his face, the idea of Gove off his face is too surreal to contemplate.
