Cameron - you took drugs. Sue me if you didn’t.
David Cameron’s lack of judgement in this ‘did you take drugs when you were younger’ business is worrying.
In an unfair world if you do not deny it then you are tacitly admitting it. I would hazard a guess that the only reason he’s not saying ‘I did not take any drugs’ is because he knows the instant he does somebody who saw him do it will sell the story to the highest bidder and, for Cameron, the leadership campaign would be over.
From The Times:
“I’m allowed to have had a private life before politics, in which we make mistakes and we do things that we should not — and we are all human and we err and stray,” Mr Cameron said on ‘Question Time.
All this talk about ‘erring’ and ’straying’ and ‘mistakes made’ (a typically weedy phrase of denial, often used by MPs caught in flagrante delicto with their secretaries and prompting one to wonder how the ‘lady’ in question feels about being regarded as a ‘mistake’) just makes him look bad.
Why not admit what everybody now knows to be true, express your regrets and move on?
PS About the ’sue me’ bit in the title… You wouldn’t really, would you? I mean, I was just kidding…. I made a mistake… I erred…. I strayed…
I agree that too much fuss is being made on whether Cameron took drugs or not. It seems it is being done primarily to stop Cameron from becoming Tory leader. It just shows up how silly this whole game of politics and media is.
Personally I don’t think it generally matters what politicans do in their private life as long as it does contradict what they say in their public life. So Major’s back to basics morality was shown up by his cabinet ministers at the time and later in hindsight by himself!
However see how Clinton had the same grilling over whether he took drugs. Apparently he did but famously he didn’t ‘inhale’! And to see the US gridlocked for ages over a silly affair - Monica Lewinsky was rather pointless. Of course Bush was also in his time a notorious hell-raiser and he also dodges questions about drugs.
And as our leaders are human - why should they have any regrets if they did take any drugs? Saying sorry over things you did when you was younger just to make you more electable and to ’set an example’ - is disingenuous.
Maybe any potential leaders should sign a form promising that they have never doing anything remotely illegal like go over the speed limit, park on a double yellow line or heaven forbid, smoke a joint.
Comment by GaffaUK — October 14, 2005 @ 1:16 pm
I think the media is just blowing it out of all proportion, turning the leadership election into a bigger farce than it already is.
Comment by lascivious — October 14, 2005 @ 1:59 pm
This is just a Davis headbutt. Makes the poor rich kid look a bit silly. Leaves Davis to say “he can do what he likes, but I’ll hang dope heads when i’m in”. We all know real Tories don’t take drugs.
Comment by DE — October 14, 2005 @ 5:14 pm