What do you expect from the Tories?

Tory logic seems to be that you can’t admit to a history of drug use and be a teacher, but you can be Education Minister and aspire to become Prime Minister. It tells us that it’s absolutely appalling that Diane Abbot sipped a can of mojito on a train, but it was just a youthful indiscretion that a 30 year old Michael Gove spent much of the 90s coked off his face while at the same time writing an article for the Times in which he called for tough laws on drug use. What he must have meant was tough laws for working class people, and a nod and wink for the well connected middle class like him. Still, let’s be charitable, he must have needed something to take the edge off being a Tory.

We now have more proof that drugs are a slipperly slope to perdition. First it’s weed, then coke, then opium and before you know it, you’re a Conservative Cabinet Minister. Don’t do drugs, folks, or you might end up looking like Michael Gove or Boris Johnson.

In lieu of winning personalities, the Conservative leadership candidates are now vying with one another to create colourful background stories about their experiences with drugs while continuing to support legislation that puts drug users in jail. Just a few months ago Sajid Javid was promising to crack down on middle class drug users, only now he’s discovered that his own party is full of them, and we’re being told that it only makes them more human. It’s like a stoned version of Spartacus, in which one after another they all stand up to announce “I do drugs” “No. I do drugs”. They might all have done drugs, but it’s pretty obvious when we gaze upon the shambles that is British politics that none of them were performance enhancing.

Michael Gove and Boris Johnson have confessed to a bit of snorting, although they do that live on TV every time someone questions them about that lie about £350 million that was on the side of a bus. Rory Stewart says that he once accidentally smoked opium, a tale which sounds as plausible as those accounts of a patient in A and E with a hoover attachment which has ‘accidentally’ managed to find its way up an intimate body orifice. Rory just fell on the opium pipe, nurse, honest.

As for Jeremy Hunt and Andrea Leadsom, the drug of choice was cannabis. This came as a surprise, since most people thought that Jeremy had taken loads of drugs from the NHS, along with loads of doctors, nurses, support staff, and funding. No one ever took Jeremy and Andrea as the Cheech and Chong of the Tory party. But they didn’t inhale. They just suck.

Meanwhile Jacob Rees Mogg is about to come clean about the shameful fact that he once nibbled an After Eight before 8 pm while nanny wasn’t looking, and Dominic Raab once bit the head off a bat. Dominic is so out of it that he actually thought that he could prorogue parliament and suspend democracy.

Since the Tories can’t deliver a hard Brexit, they’re going to deliver hard drugs instead. Brexit does have many similarities to a Class A drug. It creates delusions, a sense of invincible superiority, makes people prone to living in a fantasy and it will cause a dreadful come down once it crashes into reality.

Let’s be honest here, of all the many things that Michael Gove has done which make him loathsome, doing a few lines of cocaine in the 1990s isn’t one of them. He has form in so many other areas.

Let's compare and contrast what happens to lesser mortals when they are caught with Class A drugs like Gove admitted to being in possession of. They’d have gone to jail. Michael Gove and his drug addled leadership competitors hope to use their drug experiences to give themselves a spot of colourful back story in the Tory leadership contest. As I said, compare and contrast.

The current Health Secretary and leadership hopeful Matt Hancock hasn’t admitted to taking any drugs (yet)  but he has been taking £32,000 in donations from the chair of a think tank that wants to privatise the NHS. Rory Stewart’s leadership campaign is being funded by a Russian hedge fund manager. Boris Johnson’s campaign has received tens of thousands of pounds from donors linked to tax havens. Jeremy Hunt is being backed by interests representing the financial sector.

That’s the really dangerous Tory addiction, their addiction to dark money and being funded by secretive think tanks backed by billionaires and multinational corporations seeking to privatise public services and avoid paying their fair share in tax. The Tories mainline on money given to them by organisations and wealthy individuals who want to destroy workers’ and social protections in order to create a capitalist free for all which will only benefit the rich, the powerful, and the well-connected. 

The Tories were then and remain now the party of class hypocrisy. They’re a party that’s funded by interests which oppose public services, which seek to ensure that the rich avoid paying for those public services upon which their business models depend. That’s what’s loathsome, that’s the Tory addiction that is truly damaging to our politics and public life.

And in the interests of balance, let's not forget that Boris Johnson described gay people as "bumboys", compared equal marriage to three men marrying a dog, discussed beating up a journalist with a criminal, called black people "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles", and was sacked twice for dishonesty. And all that makes him a good candidate for the highest office of the land? Have the Tories no standards? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.