No, since you ask, he wasn’t drunk. I read with some interest that the former Home Secretary had been on the sauce when he told me that the Chancellor’s behaviour last week had been ‘absolutely stupid’ and attacked his suitability for the leadership.
Like Shakespeare’s Menenius, Mr Clarke is well-known as a politician who ‘loves a cup of hot wine/ with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t’, but on late Thursday morning when we sat down to discuss the revolt against Mr Blair and its consequences, he didn’t touch a drop.
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