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UK: Tory MPs would be mad to turn against Cameron because of drugs Matthew d'Ancona The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 16 Oct 2005 The best Conservative leadership campaign of the past quarter-century was run by Iain Duncan Smith in 2001. Whatever mistakes IDS went on to make as Tory leader, the strategy he employed to get the job was flawless. Late to declare his candidacy, he first allowed the media to get their teeth into the favourites, Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. Then - and lethally - he orchestrated the caricaturing of Mr Portillo's modernising agenda as a faddish irrelevance: "pashmina politics", as IDS called it. At a meeting of the 1922 Committee, one of Mr Duncan Smith's lieutenants, Julian Brazier, pressed Mr Portillo on Section 28. Mr Portillo said, honestly enough, that he might review the law governing the promotion of homosexuality by town halls - generating exactly the headlines that Mr Duncan Smith had hoped for. The MPs and media scented blood: as the hustings continued, Mr Portillo was asked about gay marriage, Section 28 and - repeatedly - drugs. The modernisers' true intention was to broaden the appeal of the Conservative Party. Mr Duncan Smith's genius was to misrepresent them as fixated with sideshow issues - with the heavy implication that the Portillistas were themselves no strangers to outrageous hedonism and decadence. So it is no surprise to find that the most outspoken moderniser in the 2005 contest, David Cameron, is facing a similar attack. Asked at his party's Blackpool conference whether he had ever taken drugs, the shadow education secretary replied that he had "had a normal university experience", but declined to go further. Cross-examined on the same matter by Andrew Marr on the BBC's Sunday AM (as Marr recounts on the facing page), he asked, with visible exasperation: "Are we going to have some sort of McCarthyite hearings into every Member of Parliament?" The answer to Mr Cameron's own question is probably "Yes": he will find the scrutiny even more searching now that Sir Malcolm Rifkind has withdrawn from the race, leaving only four candidates. Last week, Sir Malcolm gave a polished conference speech. No matter: he would certainly have been eliminated from the race on Tuesday in the first round of voting by MPs. His decision to depart now and to back Kenneth Clarke is an attempt to revive the former chancellor's campaign, which has been damaged by the surge to Mr Cameron. With the race narrowing and his fellow contenders scrambling for Sir Malcolm's declared and undeclared supporters, Mr Cameron will face ever closer questioning from colleagues and journalists alike. None the less, he is right to stick to his (already pretty candid) answer on the drugs question, and to say no more. Should it emerge that, against all available evidence, Mr Cameron, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty share a dealer, and that this apparently straightforward politician is, in fact, a chemically challenged maniac, he would be finished anyway. For now, the trap being set by Mr Cameron's enemies is clear. They want him to elaborate, to be drawn into details, to contaminate his campaign with the whiff of ganja. At the moment, he is associated with an excellent speech in Blackpool and an energetic plan to change his party. His opponents long to associate him with sex and drugs and trust-fund libertines. As Terry Jones put it in Monty Python's Life of Brian: "He's not the Messiah! He's a very naughty boy!" This is all nonsense. There are legitimate reasons for MPs not to vote for Mr Cameron next week. His speech in Blackpool was better than David Davis's. By contrast, his appearance on Sunday AM was not as good as Mr Davis's on The Politics Show on the same day. Interviewed in his constituency, the shadow home secretary was everything that he was not at the Tory conference: relaxed, conversational, emotional about his constituents and his duty to them. Anyone who has watched the full interview, incidentally, will see that his attack on "charlatanry" and "image politics" was aimed at Tony Blair, not Mr Cameron. If I were Mr Davis, I would not be pinning my hopes of political recovery on parliamentary combat or platform speeches. I would be heading for the GMTV sofa, This Morning and The Wright Stuff. To improve his chances, Mr Davis does not need Punch and Judy. He needs Richard and Judy. Rhetorical power, broadcasting talent, grasp of policy, capacity both to unite and to change the party: all these are sound criteria for Tory MPs to apply next Tuesday. But to vote for or against a candidate because he may or may not have smoked a joint or two at university would be insanity. This leadership contest has already been marred by class war; it does not need a class-C war, too. For someone of my age, I suppose I have quite a stuffy attitude towards illegal drugs. But I know a bogus political argument when I hear one. The attempt to affix the garish label "Drugs!" to the side of the Cameron bandwagon is the worst sort of attack by proxy. In fact, it is merely the latest manifestation of one of the oldest battles within the Conservative Party. In 1965, Lady Douglas-Home warned that, in the contest to choose a successor to her husband, the Tories might become "such a shiny bright new party [that] no one will recognise the true Conservatives in it". Four decades later, the modern variant is to accuse anyone who says that the party needs to change of being "metropolitan". The word carries with it dark connotations, suggesting wicked dinner parties, spoilt brats with terrible plans to subvert the moral order and turn us all into dope-addled deviants. Of course, the whole point about the Tory party today is that it is not "metropolitan" enough. As Mr Davis pointed out on this page yesterday, Britain's great cities have become an electoral wasteland for the Conservatives. According to the 2001 Census, 45 per cent of the population now live in London, the seven great conurbations and 31 other cities. Include areas with new towns and industrial quarters and the figure rises to a whopping 64 per cent. But - as the present electoral map shows - the urban population feels little or no connection with the Tory party. Mr Davis and Mr Cameron understand this, and the corresponding need for the Tories to adapt as a matter of urgency to the demography of 21st-century Britain. Our cities desperately need fresh policies on education, transport, law and order and - yes - drugs. But their inhabitants will never listen to a party that seems at war with the modern world and responds to their problems with reactionary fuming rather than constructive policies. The "Cannabis Cameron" row is a huge distraction, designed to derail the Tory modernisers as an equivalent strategy did their predecessors in 2001. It is, in every sense of the word, a smokescreen. - Matthew d'Ancona is Deputy Editor of The Sunday Telegraph
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