Melanie Phillips on British Tory Party Leader's "Pothead" Past

Writing in London's Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips suggests that Tory Party Leader David Cameron may have done hard drugs as well as smoked dope--and she's mad as hell about his insouciance:

This is why the revelations about Mr Cameron should rightly disturb us. It is because they point to a collective denial of the crucial role of leadership, consistency and law in tackling the scourge of illegal drugs.

That’s why it was so dispiriting to hear the supposedly hard-line Home Secretary John Reid sneering ‘So what?’ at Mr Cameron’s history of drug taking. That’s why it was so depressing to hear MPs from even the Right of the Tory Party saying that these revelations made them look more ‘normal’.

Would these people welcome a spot of shoplifting or grievous bodily harm on their front bench, one wonders, on the grounds that this too would make them look more ‘normal’? Is the Tory Party now really so degraded?

By using drug liberalisation to make the Tory Party seem cool, Mr Cameron risks making drug use itself seem cool. By not renouncing his own past in unambiguous terms, he risks turning himself into an accessory to individual misery and social mayhem.

What we need from him now is an honest and open acknowledgement of his past drug use and a declaration that he intends to pursue a zero-tolerance approach to drugs if he comes to power.

If he were to do this, no one would hold school or university misdemeanours against him. If he does not, he may find he becomes not the standard-bearer of the Tory future, but the prisoner of his own history.