Drug Corruption At the Centre of UK Government

Corrupt At The Core

The truth is Britain's entire elite has been corrupted by drug abuse for decades

Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday


Nobody will now be able to get the picture out of their head of the Right Honourable Michael Gove, Cabinet Minister, intellectual and parliamentarian, perhaps our next Premier, snorting cocaine up his nostrils at some louche London gathering.

In the background, his heedless fellow guests are braying and giggling. Thousands of miles away, the trade they have helped to finance is destroying lives by the hundred. But the menace is close at hand as well. In the dark streets not far away, the same trade is spreading like a stain, unrestrained by police and courts who long ago lost the will to fight it.

And why did they lose the will? Because they take their signals from above, and they know, in the police force and the prosecution service, and on the magistrates’ bench, that their modern masters don’t want too much fuss about drugs. For where might it end? If the drug laws were enforced, who knows who else might be treading the fools’ parade in the exercise yards of Her Majesty’s’ prisons – not just Cabinet Ministers and Privy Counsellors, but police chiefs, judges, bishops, school heads, university professors, senior civil servants, newspaper editors and BBC executives.

So rather than see that, let us be thoroughly egalitarian and just let everyone off.

I have to say Mr Gove’s confession comes as no great surprise to me.
Our entire political and media elite, across all major parties, have long been corrupted by drug abuse. I am not talking about the teenage follies they sometimes confess to. Legions of them have taken illegal drugs far more recently than they care to admit, and even more of them, idiotically, allow their teenage children to do so.

Since I was at university in the early 1970s, where I was rare in refusing to have anything to do with drugs, I have known that this country’s educated elite is trapped in this corruption.

But drug corruption is a new and special version of the plague. It is enforced by fear, not money. All of these elite bohemians know that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of witnesses to their open criminal behaviour. By the nature of the crime, they probably cannot remember all the occasions when they broke the law.

So even if they grow up and realise how stupid they have been, they dare not act seriously against the drugs menace, in case they are exposed as hypocrites by a forgotten voice from the past.