DEBATE: Are candidates’ drug histories relevant in the Conservative leadership contest?
Are candidates’ drug histories relevant in the Conservative leadership contest?
Edward Davies, director of policy at the Centre for Social Justice, says YES.
The Centre for Social Justice was founded on the premise that we are not defined by our worst mistakes, that everyone deserves another chance, and nothing should hold you back from reaching your potential.
Whether you are leaving prison or running for Prime Minister, the same principle applies. As such, Michael Gove’s admission of cocaine use shouldn’t be a barrier to his, or anybody else’s, aspirations.
But that does not mean that it doesn’t matter. Drugs consistently wreak havoc in our poorest communities, not simply through their use and addiction, but through the violence and crime that underpins the trade.
That impact is rarely felt by cocaine’s more middle-class users, but it is felt daily in the estates and backstreets of Britain. The chattering classes’ blindness to this has too often reduced the drug debate to questions of legalisation. But drug use blights our poorest communities – and so while it shouldn’t hold anybody back, it would be quite wrong to say that it is irrelevant.
Freddie Jordan, a freelance writer, says NO.
The fact that some leadership contenders tried recreational drugs in their youth is unsurprising and irrelevant. While the drugs consumed varied, what unifies them is that all were taken decades ago – when these characters occupied different worlds and bore different responsibilities.
According to YouGov, one in nine Britons admits to having tried cocaine alone. These candidates are simply unexceptional. Frankly, a Prime Minister who is inquisitive, has experimented and made mistakes early is preferable to an immutable drone so obsessed with a lifetime in governance as to grow unimaginative and unempathetic – the last person who could lift us out of the Brexit quagmire.
Debating the candidates’ pasts is a distraction from their present qualities and intentions. If Michael Gove has now learnt the lesson of hypocrisy, does it matter how he did it?
When Theresa May said that the naughtiest thing she’d done was run through a field of wheat, she was mocked for being vapid and boring. Be careful what you wish for.