As stories continue to swirl over recreational drug use in Parliament, Kit Malthouse appeared on the media round this morning to discuss the government’s plans to sniff out the suppliers and crack down on middle-class users:
“There are several thousand people who work on the estate so I’d be surprised if there wasn’t somebody taking drugs at some point, whether they’re on the estate or off…I mean where we want to get to, Nick, is a situation so that when the police are enforcing on drugs, they are as likely to do an operation outside Westminster or Sloane Square Tube [Station], or Tottenham Hale…”
A tall order…
Depressing figures this morning show 1,339 drug-related deaths were registered in Scotland in 2020, an increase of 5% on 2019 and the largest number of drug-related deaths since records began in 1996. The seventh year in a row that drug-related deaths in Scotland have hit an all-time high.
Compare this to Portugal, which decriminalised possession and despite having twice the population had only 62 deaths, whereas last year Scotland was crowned Europe’s drug death capital – a title that they have retained this year. The Scottish Government can’t escape the fact that Scotland has the same drugs laws as the rest of the UK, yet more than triple the number of drug deaths. Since the 2011 election in which the SNP won their first overall majority, drug-related deaths have more than doubled – rising from 584 to 1,339. It seems the root cause of Scotland’s addiction problem is the SNP’s addiction to focusing on independence above all else…
Tonight, Keir Starmer stonewalls Piers Morgan in a Life Stories broadcast interview after being asked 14 times whether he has taken drugs. Piers challenges Starmer: “You did not spend all your time at Leeds University in the library, did you? So, a cheeky spliff here and there?” All Keir will confirm to Piers tonight is that “We worked hard, and played hard.” When pressed for more detail, Keir claims “drugs weren’t my thing.” Piers pushes him further for a “yes or no” response. Starmer, characteristically, stays on the fence.
Exasperated Piers quite rightly asserts “Given your clear reluctance to give me a straight, simple answer, am I right in assuming from your response that you have tried drugs but that you didn’t actually like them and didn’t want to take any more? … I’m not saying it was your thing, but you did try it. I mean, you’re reluctant to just say yes. You haven’t said no.” Guido can help on this very question…
Back in 1989 when the editor was spending his weekends orbiting the M25 helping to organise acid house raves, on occasions in the week afterwards he would find himself in the courts in relation to causing a public nuisance, various noise related civil offences, and suchlike. On one occasion a young barrister from the National Council for Civil Liberties argued, on our behalf, that Thames Valley Police had acted unlawfully by setting up roadblocks and confiscating sound equipment to prevent a Sunrise rave from taking place. It was “an incredible abuse of police powers”, he argued. We lost that case…
Whilst the rave organisers were waiting outside the court, the suited, and frankly square, young barrister chit-chatted with his sartorially psychedelic clients. Making small talk to pass the time, he told them (perhaps in an effort to boost his street credibility) that when he was younger he had taken LSD. That self-confessed acid tripper was Keir Starmer…
When Michael Gove entered self-isolation yesterday he assured us he himself did not have the symptoms, though a family member had come down with some signs of Coronavirus. Sarah Vine took it upon herself to spill the family beans yesterday in her column, specifying that her daughter is the one who has put her father out of circulation. The joys of parenthood…
“In my own case, for example, our daughter Beatrice came down with a high fever and assorted Covid-19 symptoms on Sunday. She seems perfectly fine now (oh, blissful youth), but, as a precaution, the rest of us are now self-isolating, including my husband. It’s unlikely, in my view, that he will have caught it from her — being a typical teenager, she spends most of her time in voluntary self-isolation in her bedroom.”
Vine’s confession will have come as no surprise to the 18,000 TikTok followers of Gove and Vine’s daughter, who on Monday uploaded a video confessing “my family wont even talk to me now bc i have all the corona symptoms” along with another video captioned “Sidenote I have corona like I’m not even capping”. Bea’s greatest Coronavirus concern? “Cant even smoke my ouid bc my cough is so bayd”
Her very public TikTok videos – which have almost hit 830,000 video likes from her 511 uploads – include 17-year-old Bea boasting of her love of cannabis weed; smoking a blunt with a friend out of her bedroom window and accidentally calling her dealer “daddy”.. She must be annoyed by the current market’s corona-induced high prices…
Bea may find that after lockdown ends inflated weed prices means that ‘3 years of birthday money’ won’t be enough for an ounce…
UPDATE 15.40 : The TikTok account – which we did not identify above – is now set to private.
Rebecca Bong-Bailey has already come forward to admit her drug history (“Well, I’ve been to Amsterdam”); now Dawn Butler has declared her hotboxing experience, having not smoked weed herself, merely inhaling in rooms whilst others have. “We definitely have to have a debate around drugs and sex – I mean the two things MPs hate talking about but do a lot of…”
RLB loves the devil's lettuce! pic.twitter.com/r1SzcFjjsH
— Oli Dugmore (@OliDugmore) January 17, 2020
Rebecca Long-Bailey is formally launching her leadership campaign today, and her announcement coincides with a Joe interview in which the left-winger implies she has smoked cannabis. Guido is looking forward to all the other contenders answering what is now a leadership election classic question…
Watch the full interview here…
