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His rather odd position
I wonder if it is. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of drug-taking, the situation with the next generation of UK politicians is, realistically, going to be that a)they arrived in their late adolescence/early twenties at a time when drug use had never been widespread, and crucially, more fashionable (it's more widespread now, arguably, but it's definitely not as stylish - the position of, say, the hard-working rock band that prefers to say No, which ten years ago would have been box office poison - 'burn Christian, burn etc' - now seems a bit more defensible, in PR terms,) than it had been to date in Britain, and that b)whether or not they 'inhaled' themselves, any serious aspirant politicians of that particular age, whether or not they'd have realised, at that point, 'what they really wanted to do with their lives,' etc, would have almost certainly have wanted to be friends as many people as possible at uni, and so, consequently, to have tried for a bit, however abortively, to have run with 'the cool kids,' because that's how you need to be if you're even remotely going to be considered as a teh party leader.
In this respect, Mr Tony (a man from the Sixties, lest we forget,) has 'shifted the goal posts' a bit - It's just about believable that Mr B was a bit coy about dope-smoking as younger man,('ah well, I smelled these exotic scents in the common room... I didn't know what they were, though, Jeremy, *nudge, wink,* never tried them myself' and such,) in a way that would sound like implausible deniability from the likes of D Cameron. Or the Nu Labour equivalent, whenever that shows up. Specifically, as a mover and a shaker (with that pretty much *sine qua non* IMVHO future pol's desire for approval.) In the Nineties, at college, you'd have been around drugs. And not just cuddly 'Magic Roundabout' drugs either. 'Hard' drugs, like what Kate Moss has. (Had.)
The problem then being, that do you, as a politician, then carry on campaigning for laws that would, if fully implemented see, if not you, then at least some of your friends, locked up in jail?
To his credit, I think anyway, David Cameron seems to be at least trying to get away from the implicit trad Tory line, which, as with iffy share-dealing, arms sales, 'gay shame' etc seems to be encapasulted in that old thing 'Don't get caught.'
So, as absurd as it seems, and particularly insofsar as he must know this isn't going to win him any pals in the tabloids, isn't David Cameron's stance on this perhaps a vague, and admittedly very faint, sign of, y'know, principle? |
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