It was in the autumn of 2005 that the Conservative party finally shed its allegedly ‘toxic’ image and embraced modernity and the values of today’s vibrant and inclusive Britain, all through a single photograph on the front page of a tabloid newspaper.
The picture showed the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with a black whore on his lap and three kilos of gak up his left nostril, allegedly. At a stroke, the popularly held image of the Conservative party was suddenly dispelled. No longer could Labour claim that this was a party out of touch with the mainstream, a convocation of desiccated backwoodsmen who thought hip-hop was simply something one did when the prostate was playing up, and more youthful but no less humourless pencil-necked Chicago School-obsessed supply-side geeks. It helped too that the whore in question was unquestionably black, just to banish any lingering suspicions that the party still cleaved to a Monday Club view of the world. I doubt you’d have found Enoch Powell canoodling with a black whore, no matter how much cocaine he had taken, still less Geoffrey Rippon (although it is true that Teddy Taylor used to tell everyone how much he liked reggae).
Anyway, the photograph had been taken in about 1993 or ’94, when Osborne had just started work at Conservative Central Office: perhaps it was there that he met his dealer, who knows. The picture made the front page of the now defunct News of the World, which was then edited by Andy Coulson. I wondered at the time if this was a bit of spin designed to improve the party’s standings in the opinion polls, and my guess may well have been proved right. For as the whore’s lawyer, a horrible little man called Mark Lewis, has pointed out, Mr Coulson later became the party’s chief spin doctor. In fact rather oddly, Mr Lewis is suggesting that Coulson ‘downplayed’ the photograph and its implications, which is to my mind a strange description of a front page lead in what was then Britain’s most popular newspaper.
Lewis has clearly got the wrong end of the stick. The whore in question is called Natalie Rowe though, at the time, she also went under the professional title of ‘Mistress Pain’, so as to advertise her expertise as a dominatrix. A dominatrix with a special line in deferred-gratification sadism, one would guess, as almost 20 years later she is now blabbing to anyone who will listen about George’s predilection for cocaine. Perhaps this is also a bit of spin as the Tories are dropping in the polls and could do with the sort of feelgood jolt that comes, appropriately enough, from salacious photographs of a young man clearly enjoying himself with illegal substances.
Indeed, in the modern manner, nobody in the party is denying having taken cocaine. Scarcely a week goes by without some senior Tory ’fessing up, cloaked in faux-contrition, to having a septum with more perforations than a Tetley teabag. A short while ago it was that minxy blonde interrogator Louise Mensch, née Bagshawe, suggesting that it is ‘highly probable’ that she took class A drugs while dancing on a table in a nightclub with the irritating left-wing violinist Nigel Kennedy. And she added, for good measure, that it probably wasn’t the only time she’d taken them, either. Nobody got cross; indeed, she was commended for her candour and instead it was the journalist who sought to expose her who received a bucket load of vilification. Similarly, as part of the rebranding stuff with the photo in 2005, David Cameron refused to deny that he had taken cocaine when he was younger. It seems to me inconceivable that he didn’t.
When I was at university, only a few years before Dave ’n’ George, all the Tories took cocaine. The comparatively sensible left-wingers were rarely seen without spliffs and the anarchists and members of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) favoured amphetamine sulphate. The politically non-aligned went for ecstasy. As in the other major arguments of the time — the Cold War, the economy — the right won out. Cocaine — a drug I always despised because it transformed people who were already air-headed and shallow into hyperactive egomaniacs who couldn’t shut up for five minutes — has become Britain’s drug du jour. Cannabis has been replaced by skunk, amphetamine sulphate has disappeared almost as completely as laudanum, but coke reigns supreme. Perhaps this is because it is the very essence of our vapid celebrity culture, where everybody thinks they are brilliant despite really being, in truth, neither use nor ornament. And it seems to be accepted even in those old Tory bastions of Middle England that people with a lot of money, and sometimes people without a lot of money, will take cocaine if they can get hold of it. Like having bastard offspring or a penchant for sodomy, it has become socially acceptable and even cool. None of the latest revelations will remotely hurt George Osborne, and he will be free to continue his important work of destroying the British economy.
I would be interested to know, though, what they think the appropriate sentences are for young people caught today with a stash of gak, and if they think that they themselves should have been punished by the state when they were carefully rolling up their £50 notes. And we await the first admission from a Tory that he or she still takes the stuff. Because I bet they do.
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