Opinion

Allison Morris: Drug confession politicians should be judged on how they treat others

Boris Johnson is a frontrunner to be the next British prime minister. Picture by: Brian Lawless/PA Wire
Boris Johnson is a frontrunner to be the next British prime minister. Picture by: Brian Lawless/PA Wire Boris Johnson is a frontrunner to be the next British prime minister. Picture by: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

You’d be forgiven for mistaken the Tory leadership challenge for an episode of the drug drama Narcos, as the most privileged in society queue up to confess to their part dalliances with various illegal substances.

As though these confessions will somehow make them slightly more ordinary, take some of the shine off their gilded cage.

Michael Gove, a slippery character by any assessment, became a victim of his past when forced to confess about his partying ways.

Not as a teenager but a man in his 20s and 30s who liked to take cocaine with his elite friends while writing disparaging columns about those less fortunate.

Eight out of the 11 original Tory leadership candidates have at various times admitted to taking illegal drugs.

That is a figure that is probably proportionate to drug use in current western society.

While much of it has been laughed off, there is a more serious point in the very different consequences that drug use causes for some rather than others.

In parts of Britain young people from impoverished backgrounds are subject to stop and search and often end up with criminal records for little more than what the current crop of leadership hopefuls have admitted to.

You see, those young people don’t have rich parents or wealthy chums or the odd Lord in their family tree to ensure they are protected from the consequences of youthful experimentation.

The recent drugs confessions of the candidates show how detached most of their lives are from the people they now want to represent, mainly admissions of one time, non-specific drug use while at university.

Current odds on favourite Boris Johnson made a joke of his drug use, buffered from any real criticism by his own buffoonery he seems immune from scrutiny, despite being a man of questionable moral character with a loose grasp on the truth.

Gove was caught with his nose in a line prior to his political career and during his time as a journalist, his lack of empathy as both a columnist and later politician for those with addictions and locked up as a result of criminality linked to their drug use makes him a hypocrite of the worst kind.

Rory Stewart, the outsider who is amusing the masses with his quirky social media posts, said he smoked opium at a wedding in Iran but ‘walked it off’. Sure, as every stag party participant knows, what happens in Iran stays in Iran.

Jeremy Hunt revealed he had a ‘cannabis lassi’, a yoghurt-based drink, when he was backpacking through India in his youth, every word of that screams privilege.

Andrea Leadsom, admitted to smoking “weed” at Warwick University in the 1980s, the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard about her.

Dominic Raab, the former Brexit secretary, again admitted to smoking cannabis at university – albeit the Tory politician factory at Oxford.

Should any of these revelations stop a person becoming a politician or even a prime minister?

Well no, is the short answer.

But what should be considered is how when they are elected, they treat others.

Those who never got to university, who never had a life where recreational drug use was considered not edgy or rebellious but criminal.

They should be judged on the criminalisation of young men of colour, the endless wasted lives blighted by political policies that deem them worthless.

For a lack of investment in drug rehabilitation centres, for high levels of suicide.

For the fake ‘war on drugs’ that only served to exacerbate a problem that countries such as Portugal have long since decided needed to be treated as a health issue rather than a criminal justice one.

They should be judged on their reckless Brexit policies that will bring further poverty to many areas.

They should be made to talk to one of the young men from Northern Ireland who walk with a limp after being shot in the legs by paramilitaries over behaviour that is deemed anti-social in our world but ‘edgy’ in theirs.

They should go and visit the prisons full of a section of society they’ve looked down their noses at in between lines of coke at posh parties full of people called Poppy and Peregrine.

And then they should tell us what they are going to do about it, tell us how they are going to make life more equal for the people they rely on to elect them.

They should tell us how they are going to invest in youth services and education and substandard housing to give everyone a fair start in life.

Do all that, and I couldn’t care less if they spent their youth stoned listening to Bob Dylan in the halls of an elite university.