ANOTHER VOICE

Now is the time for all good men to confess to the shameful secrets of their youth

MATTHEW PARRIS

Live radio can be terrifying. Of course you get accustomed to doing it, up to a point, and after years of experience you cease to get those awful butterflies in the stomach when the phone rings and you know it's the down-the-line interview you had earlier agreed to give. Your mind doesn't blank as it used to when you were just a novice. You can even become a bit blasé, up to a point.

But there's an element of risk and you know it. Now and again you will be caught off guard by an unexpected question, and, when you're live, there's no way out.

Thus it was that just a few minutes after eight o'clock last Tuesday morning, tele- phone in hand, I felt the colour draining from my face. I was live on LBC, and they'd just asked me the drugs question.

We media folk don't expect to have the tables turned on us. Surely it's we who ask the questions, and the politicians who squirm. I had agreed to talk to LBC inter- viewer, Sandy Warr, about the Tories and drugs. It was the morning when the Times had revealed that the principal opposition spokesman on agriculture, Tim Yeo, was not only prepared to say that he had smoked marijuana at university, but was also insist- ing that he had enjoyed it. Mr Yeo had become the eighth member of the shadow Cabinet to talk about youthful experience of the drug, after Francis Maude, David Wil- letts, Bernard Jenkin, Archie Norman, Tom Strathclyde, Peter Ainsworth and Oliver Letwin. I thought we were going to restrict our conversation to them.

But no, Sandy went straight over the wire with her first question. 'Did you ever smoke marijuana at university, Matthew?' she asked.

My blood ran cold. Skewered! In a single microsecond I saw my whole career and reputation slipping away. One shock admis- sion, and I would make myself virtually unemployable by any respectable broad caster or editor. Yet I dared not lie: too many people knew the truth — and the Daily Mail pays big.

I paused, flannelled for a moment, swal- lowed hard, then — 'Oh, what the heck,' I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound' blurted it out.

`N-n-no,' I stammered, 'I don't know why, but I never did.'

The shame of it. I wanted to explain, but would anyone understand? It had been a long, long time ago, social pressures were strong in those days, and — OK, I admit it — I was not brave. I just copied my friends. I've reformed since then; coughing bravely I've tried smoking dope, swallowed LSD and sniffed cocaine at Yale, tried to live down those undergraduate years squan- dered on instant coffee and lager-and-lime.

Look, it was a stage I was going through. A boy like me needed time. I had to make those early mistakes. As an undergraduate at Cambridge I lacked the confidence I was later to develop. None of my set at Clare in the early Seventies took any drugs except alcohol; we were mostly grammar-school lads who used to like wearing our gowns to supper in hall although it wasn't compulso- ry, and learned the Latin grace by heart.

I feel ashamed of all that now but it's too late for regret. I must simply come to terms with what I was: a bit of a prig. Cripes, didn't even experiment with homosexuality. My first gay experience was when I was 26, for heaven's sake! I feel such a coward, now, thinking back. I don't know how I can look Michael Portillo in the eye. I was weak, I admit it.

And if I can make a clean breast of youthful error, can we now hear from some of those MPs who have yet to explain them- selves? Mr Oliver Letwin, for example, who told reporters that, although he had indeed smoked marijuana, this had been by mis- take. Some friends spiked his pipe with dope. 'I was very angry.'

Maybe he was. I'm just stunned. What the hell was Oliver Letwin doing smoking a pipe at university? One is prodigiously indifferent to what the young prat put in his pipe, it could have been cowpats for all I care, but I'm appalled to learn that a chap who now claims to be 'ready for govern- ment' as a Cabinet minister was prancing about not many years ago as an undergrad- uate with a pipe. What a posturer! We had a few of these at Clare, too: tweedy jackets and ties to lectures, leather patches on their `David Willetts was out of both his brains' elbows, and new straw boaters bought espe- cially for punting. Letwin probably had a pouch for his tobacco, and later experi- mented with a bow-tie or detachable col- lars. And this man purports to be poised to take over the nation's purse-strings as a Tory chief secretary.

Or take Andrew Lansley. A fairly young MP, Mr Lansley has some claim to be one of the thinkers of the Tory party. He has been in charge of research, shadows the Cabinet Office, and is widely spoken of as an original mind, ready and able to think the unthinkable.

But not to smoke the smokable. Lansley has now confessed to never having tried marijuana at university. Such timidity speaks ill of his intellectual courage now. Next, I dare say, will come the confession that he has never holidayed abroad. What else hasn't Lansley done? I think we should be told.

Another dismaying revelation has been that of Liam Fox. Dr Fox found himself unable to look his interviewer in the eye and deny the truth: that he, too, funked the soft drugs experiment at university. I ask you! And this is the man who wants to take charge of the nation's health service, to make decisions on the medicinal use of cannabis, pronounce on the addictive quali- ties of (for instance) nicotine and cannabis.

The revelations are little short of shock- ing. But when it comes to the Prime Minis- ter I cannot even say I'm surprised — just sad. It would be nice to think that a young chap with long hair and a rock band called Ugly Rumours might have wanted to walk a few paces on the wild side; but I fear that Tony Blair's admission that he never did is all too believable, the creep.

I know the type: I remember the God Squad at Cambridge, and doubtless Oxford was similar. Guitars and jeans with creases, coffee and folk music in the crypt, 'out- reach' work in the long vac, a dawning sus- picion that God wants you for a sunbeam . . these were among the telltale signs of a young life destined to go dangerously off the rails later. The word's out now I've spo- ken to Sandy, but I've sorted my life out since I was young, honestly. These politi- cians haven't. Don't say you haven't been warned.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.