Tory leadership: Where has all the booze gone?
The Tory beauty contest has been sadly drab so far. Even the promises of what candidates would do for the nation in the few days, weeks or months they might have as the next Prime Minister have scarcely raised an eyebrow. This may be because we know that they will not be kept. Had it been otherwise we might have expected that Mr Johnson’s bold proposal to cut his own tax-bill – and naturally Mr Rees-Mogg’s too – might have provoked a spot of discontent. But it seems to have been met with general indifference, even from fellow hacks not fortunate enough to be paid a quarter of a million a year for a weekly thousand words of waffle written in a style that would have seemed somewhat laboured in Punch (*) seventy years ago.
Instead there has been more fuss about Mr Gove’s admission that in his giddy youth, when he was a thrusting young journalist, he had the habit of snorting cocaine. He confessed that this made him a criminal as he was in possession of a banned substance, if only it was up his nose. This interesting information has had other would-be Prime Ministers hurrying forward to boast of their own long-ago criminal activities, all eager to prevent the former Justice Minister from hogging the limelight and securing the druggy vote.
Actually all this bores me. I am not interested in their drug habits, though Mr Stewart’s confession of opium smoking has a touch of old-fashioned class about it, or would have if he hadn’t admitted to only a single pipe, smoked years ago in Iran or Iraq or some such country. In general, one doesn’t associate British Prime Ministers with prohibited substances. Even the Benzedrine with which Sir Anthony Eden kept himself going in the weeks when he was planning to reconquer Egypt and dispose of Colonel Nasser could be bought over the counter at Boots, or indeed any chemist’s shop, with no need for a prescription. Likewise there was no priggish restriction on the sale of laudanum which so many swigged in the Golden Victorian Age recently so stylishly evoked by Mr Rees-Mogg in his widely acclaimed bestseller.
No, it’s not drugs one wants to hear about from those eager to host weekends at Chequers, it’s booze. This is the test. Ever since the days of Sir Robert Walpole, our first Prime Minister, British political life has floated on a sea of alcohol. Port-drinking may have caused the Elder Pitt to be driven near to madness by gout, but this didn’t deter his son, Prime Minister for almost twenty years, from being known as a three-bottle man. That’s three bottles of port a day, not the 14 “units of alcohol” a week that medical killjoys now decree a safe limit. Many, perhaps most, twentieth century politicians exceeded that limit every day. We all know about Churchill’s heroic level of consumption. Indeed, it was never a secret. Hitler in conversation with Goebbels dismissed him as a drunk, but Hitler, the teetotaller, lost the war, while Churchill in conjunction with the vodka-drinking Stalin and Roosevelt, who ended Prohibition and favoured extra-strong Dry Martinis, won it.
Back in the days when Britannia really did rule the waves, Churchill got his first Cabinet post from Asquith who on account of his heavy drinking was known as Squiffy, though his biographer, the claret-drinking Roy Jenkins, insisted that if, as Prime Minister, Asquith was sometimes unsteady on his feet in the House of Commons, his mind and diction remained crystal-clear. Lloyd George may not have been a drinker – he preferred sex – and I’m not sure about Baldwin. He declined to make Birkenhead (F.E. Smith) Lord Chancellor again on the grounds that it would be unseemly for the head of the judiciary to be seen drunk in the street, but this didn’t deter him from making him Secretary of State for India. Clement Attlee wasn’t much of a drinker, but the most brilliant of his ministers Aneurin Bevan liked a bottle or two of champagne and Attlee kept Arthur Greenwood in his Cabinet though he preferred to transact Government business from the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel and is said to have been unable to sign his name after lunch.
Harold Wilson, who now seems to have been a better Prime Minister than he seemed at the time, was fond of brandy, though he wasn’t a drunk like his Foreign Secretary George Brown. (Mogg the Elder said that George Brown drunk was a better man than Harold Wilson sober.) The last Tory Prime Ministers of the twentieth century, Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, were none of them averse to a drop of whisky, more than a drop indeed. Mrs Thatcher, I’ve been told, could, and sometimes would, put away the whisky in a manner and quantity that would have won her the respect of hardened topers in a Glasgow pub, had she ever ventured into one.
Finally, Charlie Kennedy, the party leader I have most respected in the last twenty years, and the only one to have had the intelligence, common sense and gumption to oppose Tony Blair’s Iraq war, was a Highland Scot with more than a fondness for “the cratur”, but his drinking was deemed unsuitable for our puritanical times, and his timid party pushed him out, something that Liberal Democrat voters have surely had cause to regret.
So, thinking of Charlie, it’s perhaps no surprise that the candidates in the dark comedy of the Tory leadership election may confess to experiments with drugs in their youth, but say nothing about booze. After all, we live in a time when even newspaper offices are dry and a lunchtime sandwich at the desk has replaced a session in El Vino’s, a development which, as much as anything, may account for the decline in quality and circulation of the printed press.
Sadly the only politician now who is happy to be associated with booze and photographed with a pint in his hand is Nigel Farage. Could it be that this is why his new child, the Brexit Party, stands high in the polls. Is there a lesson here for the Tory aspirants? If there is, will they learn it?
* Punch: a humorous weekly, long defunct.