“Michael Gove is a man who invites a number of opinions, a great deal of them unflattering, even within the Conservative party, but I am yet to meet a Tory MP who sincerely believes that it would have been better for anyone had he spent a decent chunk of the early noughties in prison. Yet the official position of his party, and that of the main opposition, is that it would.
I do not always agree with Stephen Bush, the deputy editor of the New Statesman, but ain’t that the truth?
“That’s right: it is Tory party policy that they would have been better off if one of their most dynamic administrators and a near permanent presence on the frontbench since his entry into politics had been either imprisoned or working in a minimum wage job. That might be the private view of some teachers and some particularly committed pro-Europeans but it’s an odd look for a party that might yet make him prime minister.”
Even odder that the very suggestion that the leading candidate to be prime minister might not have taken cocaine on multiple occasions elicits laughter from all quarters. In fact according to the Sun, seven of the eleven candidates for the Tory leadership admit they have used banned substances in the past. The same article adds that Boris Johnson claims that he only did it the once, but hesneezedsoitdidn’tgouphisnose, and it mayhavebeenicingsugaranyway. Now, I do not deny that kind of thing can happen. I was first offered the chance to smoke some grass when I was at secondary school. Man, that was some real grassy grass. But the idea that, having left Oxford and achieved such early success as journalist that getting sacked by the Times for falsifying a quote was but the start of his career, the freewheeling young Boris was so chastened by his early experience that he never again sought to obtain the substances so widely used by his media colleagues convinces about as well as the idea that he stuck to icing sugar thereafter. Ladies and gentlemen: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Stephen Bush’s article in the Guardian, “Michael Gove got high but his party champions a futile war on drugs”, continues:
The overwhelming evidence from around the democratic world is that countries which have legalised drugs have seen numbers of drug deaths fall and have taken billions out of the criminal economy.
Shit I find myself agreeing with The Guardian.
Time for my one bullet, my revolver and my best whisky…..
I’m in favour of legalising drugs for 2 main reasons:
my body is mine, not the State’s
legalisation would reduce crime and increase safety.
I know that there is another view, keep them criminal. OK, I don’t agree with it but I can respect it. What I can’t respect is the deceit, duplicity and hypocrisy of people like Gove and so many other politicians.
The extent to which I despise our political class grows, or deepens, almost every day.
I think he could have met many Tory voters over the last three years who wished devoutly that Gove had been in jail when his incompetent treachery ensured that Theresa May became leader – but I guess the deputy editor of the New Statesman doesn’t meet many Tory voters.
It may yet prove a blessing in disguise that so many Tory MPs should have been given the opportunity so to expose themselves – and I’m not thinking of Gove snorting away while banning it for others, though it all adds to one’s impression of the man. But we are not out of the Brexit woods yet. Even if we were, I’d not thank Gove for it.
I appreciate that finding our leaders break their own laws is a good argument for telling them to have fewer, but I don’t see why we can’t demand a higher standard and fewer laws. And right now I do not want to see a forgiving mood in Tory constituency associations.
Meanwhile, am I right in recalling that Trump is a very sober man?
Yes, Trump is teetotal.
I think Gove is villified unfairly for allegedly ‘stabbing Boris in the back in 2016’. Gove had as much right to stand for the Conservative leadership as Boris. That Gove chose not to defer to Boris exposed Boris as, in my opinion, a wimp who chickened out of a legitimate contest and, once again , displayed very poor judgement.
Gove didn’t knife Boris anymore than Ed Miliband knifed David Miliband in the Labour leadership some years earlier.
There is no good reason for a candidate not to stand against a peer who, for some reason and in some quarters, might be perceived as ‘senior’.
We certainly wouldn’t have President Trump if that sort of deference was in place; we’d probably have President Jeb Bush.
And we most definitely would not have had Margaret Thatcher as Coservative leader from 1975.
The real villainess of the 2016 Conservative leadership race was Andrea Leadsom, who wimped out, then Boris himself as the subsidiary villain and fellow wimp. But not Gove that time.
P.S. I really don’t like Boris.
You had me at the first reason, but yes.
This reminds me of Bill Clinton’s “I smoked weed but didn’t inhale” and Blair’s “I haven’t, but if I had, I would have inhaled” rejoinder.
How cool we thought he was! *Tongue slightly in cheek*
How badly he let us down, scarred us, and drove us to the other side.
James Strong (June 9, 2019 at 5:52 pm), just for the record I think you are not recalling some important details. Gove was the manager of Boris’ leadership campaign. No-one forced him to take that role. Obviously he could have stood against Boris from the start in a “may the best Brexitteer win” spirit, and no-one would have blamed him. Or he could have told Boris he was resigning from the job of being his leadership campaign manager in order to stand for himself and then told the world about it, and been much less blameable. What he actually did was correctly understood as the calculatedly-treacherous destruction of a rival. It was also, as events swiftly proved, very inept even in its own self-serving terms.
FWIW Leadsom did not expect to be the leadership candidate. She had been promised a plum cabinet post by Boris. After Gove destroyed Boris and himself, she was the leaver left standing. I very much agree she was weak but Gove is to blame for the whole situation.
There is a well-known anecdote about president Kennedy asking if a political ally could be trusted. “While his interests align with yours, but no longer”, was the essence of the reply. Kennedy responded that of course that went without saying. “What I want to know is, will he phone me up and tell me he’s about to screw me or will I only find out about it when he screws me?” Gove answered the question for himself.
What this rash of confessions makes interesting to me is the prospect of a British Prime Minister being ineligible for a US visa, as, AIUI, if you have broken drugs laws anywhere, you are not, by Federal law, eligible to enter the United States. And more so, if you have entered the USA and lied about previous drug matters, you have entered the USA illegally and are therefore subject to prosecution by the United States. AIUI, Mr Gove has been to the United States of America and was not a US citizen at the time (unlike Boris Johnson), so if he, or any other druggie non-US citizen at the time candidate is liable to prosecution under US law, what sort of position does that put the UK in if its Prime Minister is awaiting the prospect of a spell in the custody of the US Marshals upon leaving office (heads of government have functional diplomatic immunity when in the USA, AIUI) or might face an extradition request from the United States whilst in office, from a (mischievous?) Department of Justice.
Very interesting comment from Mr Ed.
I’d like to add a 3rd reason to the reasons given by James Strong:
I do not want my tax money spent on preventing other people from ruining their own health.
I’ll throw in a 4th reason for good measure:
having laws which are not and cannot be severely enforced, makes a mockery of the rule of law.
If, however, the “overwhelming evidence” mentioned by Stephen Bush turns out to be less than overwhelming, then i might be willing to change my mind.
One aspect of this grates a bit.
I’ve always loved to drive fast machines fast. Before I discovered trails and racetracks, I had enough speeding tickets to paper a wall. It’s still a dicey thing depending on which vehicle I’m driving.
And yet here I am, supporting speed limits.
You can have aspirations of better things for society and still fall short of your own better judgment. You can speed and still believe that it’s unsafe and ought to be banned. You can do lines and still believe that coke ultimately harms society.
(I’m in agreement that the war on drugs is a cruel and suicidal thing that ought to go away. I just think the Gove illustration fails.)
Focusing in on the “are not” for a second…what if those laws are handwaved in the case of Gove, Johnson, Hancock, Leadsom, Raab, Hunt et al…and so on.
It’s a bit tedious, isn’t it, when we’re using those same laws to justify stop and search for non-whites?
“What this rash of confessions makes interesting to me is the prospect of a British Prime Minister being ineligible for a US visa, as, AIUI, if you have broken drugs laws anywhere, you are not, by Federal law, eligible to enter the United States.”
Really? Hmm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/americas/24iht-dems.3272493.html
Surely the key point about “Law” is that it applies to EVERYONE in the jurisdiction? Otherwise, “Law” is merely a fancy term for self-dealing by the powerful. If Political Class insiders like Gove and Hillary Clinton get a pass on breaking some of our over-abundance of laws, then we are getting very close to pre-Revolutionary France.
Possibly related — a friend’s son took advantage of a program which allowed Minnesota high school seniors to spend a semester at a German high school. The son remarked that his US school had a thick wad of regulations, most of which were enforced only intermittently if at all. The German high school had fairly few regulations — but any breach of those regulations was treated very seriously. Perhaps would-be lawmakers should spend some time in German high schools?
Human history shows that, no matter the era or the place, a certain proportion of the population is always going to seek out psychoactive substances for spiritual or recreational purposes, from Siberian shamans feasting on toadstools to Amazonian tribes and their ayahuasca ceremonies to Victorian spinsters with their bottles of laudanum.
Given this, would you prefer that the supply of such substances:
A) Be the preserve of the criminal underworld, supplying unknown substances of unknown provenance and unknown purity to vulnerable customers who have little recourse or ability to complain about substandard goods and who run the risk of dying from an accidental overdose or because the substance has been ‘cut’ with something poisonous, or
B) Be lawfully offered for sale by commercial organisations who can be held accountable for the quality, purity and strength of their wares, who can source their ingredients openly and traceably so that the consumer can have confidence that the product is as described?
Dominic Frisby tells in his book ‘Life After The State’ of his experiment in buying a minute piece of cannabis resin from a ‘dark web’ marketplace which offered purchasers the opportunity to rate and give feedback on sellers in the eBay manner, writing that he would far rather do this – or have his teenage children do it – than frequent dark alleyways or buy dubious tablets under the table in nightclubs, as the ‘dark web’ seller, while still outside the law, nevertheless is incentivized by the two-way nature of the transaction to behave honestly.
I had an interesting experience a week or so back, being compelled to attend a speeding awareness course.
(for the non-Uk among us – I breached the speed limit, unaware, and in order to avoid 3 points on my licence – 12 points disqualifies me from driving – I had the option to spend a Saturday afternoon being chided for my indiscretion)
The course was, amusingly, at the Wat Tyler center in Basildon, Essex. I strongly encourage anyone unfamiliar with the name to google Wat Tyler. I spent the rest of my Saturday afternoon, post-course, brushing up on my libertarian history.
The thrust of the course was not, surprisingly, that speeding kills. It was, instead, that you will get caught, due to increasing amounts of cameras. I bought into the concept; we are one of the most surveilled nations in the world. I have since stuck to the speed limit.
I have two cars, my company car, and my toy car – a 1976 MGB that I inherited from my father. I drive both under the limit, and I occasionally take the MGB to a track where I can take the piss completely and do dangerous stuff.
I became aware of the danger a few weeks back when an oncoming car overtook a cyclist in front of me. In my company car, this would have been a non-issue. Brake, ABS, no problem. In my 40 year old car, I reacted, stupidly, in the same way, and skidded hard. Had I been able to do a 3-point turn in such a (non-powered steering) car in any sense of pace, the oncoming driver would have been treated to a chase and piece of my mind. But, alas, no.
I don’t, and have never done, coke. I believe it harms individuals.
But those individuals are not my business to judge.
Wow. I would have lost my license six or seven times with such rules. But then, I’m guessing I’m 25 years older then you. In my time (what a depressing phrase) so long as you paid your ticket, you were golden. I think I had 20-25 speeding tickets in my youth (pre-25). Hell, in my county, I once held the speed record – 202 mph in a 55 mph zone. Big fine!
My point was, vilifying the failure to meet aspiration has always been the weapon of the aspirationless. To hear the progressives rip into moral people for failure to live up to those morals was always grating, seeing how those progressive people followed no morals. One of the nobilities of humanity has been our desire to do better each day – to follow those rules to which we ally, even when it’s hard to do. We fail. Daily. We try again. But at no point do we discard those morals because they’re too hard.
The progressive reaction to this has always been a rejection of aspiration. This is the root of the Gove attack – even though he had higher aspirations, he failed to achieve them, and so we should all give up.
And that’s arrant bullshit. You can have a higher target even while you miss it. What’s the point of a target you can hit daily?
Again, I’m not commenting on the morals of an anti-drug legality. I’m just saying, the conflict of aspirational morality compared to daily morality doesn’t diminish the value of the aspiration.
A good point, bobby. :>))
Still,
1. You’re suggesting it’s okay for folks to get above themselves, are you?
2. Pooh! So 202 was the best you could do? Slacker. I suppose your excuse is that the copper caught up with you while you were still revvin’ ‘er up. So whattheheck was he drivin’? 😎
You come on down here and take Fraser and me for a ride. (Bring mead.)
Stop and search is used to prevent knife crime, not drug crime.
Some years ago, the young man who blogged under the name “David Copperfield” related how he resigned from the English Police force to join the Canadian Police. Part of the interview procedure involved being linked up to a lie detecting machine and asked pertinent questions regarding his suitability to become a Canadian Police officer.
Those tasked with choosing the next leader of the Conservative Party could do worse than use this technique. In fact it could be used for every candidate for becoming an MP, irrespective of Party.
Re Gove’s backstabbing. A well-connected (in the Tory party) friend tells me that the reason Gove stood last time is that, during Boris’s campaign, Gove’d had a week of trying to get anything out of Boris with no success and that this radio silence convinced him that Boris had goven up but wasn’t going to say so.
These are the people that make the laws. They insist that if you or I take drugs we go to prison. Therefore it is only Justice that they do they same. Is there a limit of time on these cases?
Now it looks to me like Gove, and the others who have done the same, thinks that it is OK to ruin someone’s lives for flirting with drugs because they are not as useful to society as he is. Hypocrites and they deserve the full strength of the law.
The talk of prison is an exaggeration
I have spent many years practising in the criminal courts including the time Michael Gove admits to have taken cocaine. Had a policemen entered the premises where one of these parties was taking place and found him in the process of snorting a line, with a further gram in his pocket, he would probably have been cautioned for the first offence and fined thereafter.
My second point, is that the proper response to a question “have you ever taken cocaine?” is “I don’t know”.
It may have been sold to you as cocaine, looked like cocaine and had an effect one might expect from taking cocaine, but you could not categorically say it was cocaine unless it was forensically analysed.
Apart from Steve Baker –who isn’t yet in the race but should be–they are ALL shite.
Gove–a known snake who adds to his lustre by being found to be snorting coke while his gang jail and ban anyone else from doing so. I wonder if the two-visaged turd was into legal highs as well before the po-faced hypocrites made them illegal.
And BoJo–Dear Christ he needs a list–
* Wants to revive Treason May’s shite WA BRINO. Stupid son of a bitch.
*Amnesty for 10 million illegals. Did the brainless bastard watch “Alias Smith & Jones” too many times as a kid?
* As per Raedewald’s blog now a £10 billion bribe for middle class public sector trash–precisely those who will NEVER vote Tory–paid for by the poor. Exactly the same idiot caper as Treason attempted and utterly useless bribes.
BOJO IS SHITE.
THEY ARE ALL SHITE.
Steve Baker–For the Love of God please step up. If you can get to a members vote you are in with a chance.
Clovis Sangrail (June 10, 2019 at 7:22 am), I have heard (with mingled amusement and contempt) several stories along those lines from Tory establishment insiders. One such told me with a straight face that Boris played in a cricket match on the Saturday after the Thursday 2016 Brexit referendum, and could not be induced to interrupt it for incoming calls, thus showing “he has the attention span of a gnat”. I hold no brief to praise Boris’ work habits but I felt the story was telling me less about Boris than about the establishment line.
If Gove really did have the sheer brass chutzpah to claim that he thought Boris had “given up, but wasn’t going to say so”, that would also add to one’s sense of the man. It would exceed in insolence even those establishment-line stories.
Obviously, it would have been a rather on-a-technicality-style dodging of Kennedy’s litmus test for Gove to have said, “Oh I tried to get in touch with Boris but couldn’t, so left my resignation as his leadership campaign chairman on his answerphone” 🙂 – but for whatever anyone thinks that would have been worth, it is a matter of record that Gove did not do even that.
Doubtless they were all tired during the week after a hard campaign. But how Gove arranged for Boris to find out that Gove was no longer leading Boris’ leadership campaign says something very fundamental about Gove.
A head-of-government’s diplomatic immunity would cover it. Certainly in the UK we’ve had plenty of visitors (Mugabe, for example) who have done things in their home countries that would be actionable without it. (Typically, the only time anyone ever tried was against lefty-hate-figure Pinochet, but if Blair established any precedent in that case, it was that Gove has nothing to worry about.)
So it would merely fall into that very large category of things that would be embarrassing if the politician involved could be embarrassed.
@Niall (June 10, 10.10 a.m.)
Good point, I think.
I’m not an insider, so I don’t know what the form is in these situations.
Ha! Sorry, this particular vehicle only had half of a seat. You sat on the hydraulic reservoir. No cupholders for the mead. The only real amenity in the cab was that, if you leaned back a little, you could light your cigarettes on the exhaust manifold.
I’m a fan. Tell me more!
But to your earlier point; I made it until my late 30s without a single citation for speeding. I don’t drive like an idiot, and as far as I can tell, I’ve not got worse over the years. I find it unlikely that I drive more recklessly now as a 42 yr old (and that answers your questions on age difference) in my company car than when I was 18 years old in my beat up old ’77 Mini Cooper (I didn’t get to 202mph, but 100 was within reach. Downhill).
The difference? Cameras. I’ve been caught four times now, never at ridiculous speeds, only ever at more than I genuinely thought the limit was.
Surveillance is a hobby-horse of mine. I hate it.
We built an experimental drag car 35 years ago with a kludged-together continuously-variable hydrostatic transmission, based on a (then) new type of hydraulic pump, matched to a 360hp chevy 350 engine.
We were testing it on a closed airfield runway with the owner’s permission, and had a disagreement with the local police as to the applicability of state speed statutes on a semi-private “road.” We eventually prevailed, but it was interesting.
It was exhilarating when it ran, but we kept blowing up the hydraulics, and eventually cut our losses and sold it (too cheaply) to a Parker Hannifan affiliate, who played with it for a bit and then donated it to the local vo-tech hydraulics school as a sort of precautionary example of why you shouldn’t let certain people design hydraulic circuits.
I’ve never even seen a speed camera here in not-urban USA. I generally confined my idiocies to long deserted stretches of rural roads or freeways, where you can see other traffic for miles before you get close. But radar . . . 😛
I’m much more boring now, though.
Fine. The solution is so simple! You only gots to get yourself a Lamborghini Aventador and shoot on down here in it (you can surely squirrel the mead away in there somewhere).
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/top-10-fastest-cars-in-the-world/
There’s an Aston-Martin in the list, but you’re not Bond, James Bond, and I’m certainly not P.G.!, and besides I’ve always wanted a Lamborghini. 😎
Ah, heck, Julie, those are just the fastest production cars! Dragsters routinely hit 300mph+ nowadays.
(But I bet the Aventador has cup holders. That’s a plus.)
Yeah, well, I was specifically shopping for a stock-car for you. Now that you’ve turned over a new leaf, I thought you wouldn’t be up for a really fast car. *sniff*
However, if you want a good-looking dragster that’s legal on the highway, feel free. I’m sure ’twill suffice nicely. 😀
.
Speaking of having sidled off-topic…. 😆
bobby b
I now have a vision of you in a contraption like Dick Dastardly‘s cars from Wacky Races whizzing around Minnesota, roasting a Mennonite chicken on the exhaust manifold, pursued by hapless State Troopers.
I look forward to the Guardian applying this logic to guns
Michael Gove is a friend of the arch drug warrior Peter Hitchens – the man who says he supports Victorian principles, seemingly unaware that in the Victorian Age the drug laws did-not-exist, although drugs most certainly did exist and were used. There is nothing “traditionalist” or “conservative” about this matter.
The contradiction of an “arch traditionalist”, Peter Hitchens, who supports the Progressive War on Drugs (an import from the American Progressive movement in the 20th century) and a “Progressive Conservative” (surely an oxymoron) Michael Gove who writes articles denouncing drug use, whilst using drugs – well the contradictions should be obvious.
As for me – I never have used drugs, although I seem to be the only person who has not done so. Perhaps I am just a boring person.
@Mr Ed
Even though I’m unclear what makes a chicken a Mennonite chicken, I can’t get that picture of bobby b out of my mind.
Paul, I suspect, as with many a similar trope in modern culture, that an exaggerated impression of how rare it is never to have done drugs goes hand in hand with an interestedly-exaggerated impression of how interesting it was to be one of those who did do drugs. AFAICT (I don’t go around testing them 🙂 ), most of those I know well enough are in one of the twin camps of ‘never’ and ‘once/rarely as teen – then I grew up’.
Kind of like socialism – which I was raised in and, unlike drugs, can only claim never to have done (not even once/rarely as a teen) if we take a rather strict definition of what ‘doing’ means. Maybe I could get away with saying that, though I smoked some socialist cant when I was young, I did not inhale. 🙂
Dang. That was way too accurate.
I’m going to have to pay more attention to basic internet security.
A chicken raised by Mennonites, in the Mennonite faith. A tasty, free-range chicken . . . (I buy all of my chickens from the Mennonite and Hutterite colonies. Not very snappy dressers, but, boy, can they raise chickens!)
bobby,
What do those chickens eat? Specifically, I wonder whether they get a lot of corn.
To be frank, to me Gordon Ramsay is a p. on the a. of Mankind (going strictly by his TV shows — I’ve never actually dated Gordon), but he did say one interesting thing. On a show with one of his kids acting as a “helper” to Daddy, she asked how come the chickens they were preparing were this rich yellow color instead of what we generally see in the supermarket (pasty white and pretty flavorless IMO, with no “dark” meat to speak of).
“Master Chef” informed her that the chickens he used were corn-fed.
I am plenty old enough to remember when raw chicken looked like the chicken on his show. And had flavor, and real dark meat.
Apparently “corn-fed chicken” is a Thing in Britain, which can be ordered on-line if you’re situated in the Sceptred Isles; I could find no such thing on offer here.
Hence my query. :>)
Julie:
You got it right. Corn.
And they are like the chickens of old, with flavor, and dark and white meat, and large . . .
Ok, now I’m hungry.
Thank you, bobby!
I wonder if I should consider moving to the Twin Cities. Course there is, or was, a Mennonite colony in central Illinois. I wonder if they have chickens. :>)