James Delingpole James Delingpole

The truth about me, David Cameron, drugs and Supertramp

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3″ title=”Rod Liddle and James Delingpole debate if all right wing people have bad music tastes” startat=700]

Listen

[/audioplayer]This week I woke up shocked to find myself on the front page of the Daily Mail. Apparently I’m the first person in history to have gone on the record about taking drugs with a British prime minister. But it’s really no big deal is it? Had I thought so, I’d never have spilled the beans.

In fact, I think it’s one of those perfect non-scandal scandals in which all parties benefit. Dave acquires an extra bit of hinterland and is revealed to have been a normal young man. I get 100 more Twitter followers and a couple of columns. No one is hurt because, let’s face it, smoking drugs at university is a healthy expression of youthful curiosity. It’s all those freako, career-safe politicians who have never done drugs who should really worry us.

Not that Dave and our contemporaries were a particularly druggy Oxford generation. All that came a couple of years later, when rave culture kicked in and suddenly everyone was doing ecstasy and charlie. We were much more interested in reliving Brideshead Revisited. The series had been on TV not long before we came up, and they didn’t do drugs in Brideshead. They did champagne (Sebastian Flyte) and ­Brandy Alexanders (Anthony Blanche), so fizz and cocktails were what we did mainly too. If the TV series had never happened, Oxford in the early 1980s might have looked very ­different.

So when Dave and our mutual friend James and I repaired to my rooms in Christ Church for a cheeky smoke, we were being quite radical for our time. ‘Sure Oxford has a drugs problem. The problem is we can’t get hold of drugs for love nor money,’ said a Christ Church friend of mine to a BBC TV news crew, somewhat insensitively, given that they’d come to report on the death of poor Olivia Channon who’d overdosed on speedballs (heroin and cocaine) in a room belonging to Gottfried von Bismarck.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in