Ross Clark Ross Clark

The real problem with Michael Gove’s drug admission

The problem for Michael Gove is not that thousands of Conservative party members will open their copy of the Daily Mail this morning and think to themselves: ‘Gove has taken illegal drugs, therefore he is unfit to be Prime Minister’. It is that Gove or his supporters will fall into the trap of trying to turn his admission into a virtue. How tempting it will be for them to try to say: ‘look, all Govey’s done is what millions of other students have done. That makes him a normal human being – unlike all these swivel-eyed moralists who would condemn him for it’.

But that is what would be fatal to Gove’s chances of winning the Tory leadership. No, it isn’t normal behaviour to take class A drugs – not as a student and not as professional in your early 30s, as Gove was when he snorted his coke. Coke might be widely used among the London media set, and in banking and legal circles too. But to the wider population it remains a minority activity, a criminal act indulged in by the feckless and irresponsible – those who don’t care that they are complicit in a murderous international trade, nor that they are helping to make lives a misery for the millions caught up in the consequences of drug abuse.

According to a Home Office survey in 2013, only 15 per cent of Britons have used a class A drug. Even cannabis, which according to many Metropolitan liberals is in such widespread use that continued prohibition is pointless, is still a stranger to two-thirds of the population – the same survey found that 35.9 per cent of people had ever tried any kind of illegal drug.

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