What goes up must come out
When the Daily Mail secured the serialisation rights to a new biography of Ken Livingstone, knowing it would reveal three children he’d kept private for years, this can’t have been the 24 hours they had envisaged they would see when the revelation was made.
For a start, Ken revealed it himself on BBC London last night, rather than letting the Mail put its own spin on the story first.
Second, I haven’t yet heard anyone who’s particularly bothered about it. At most, people express surprise that he managed so successfully to keep his private life away from the prying eyes of the media for so long.
But third, for some reason, today was also the day that the mainstream media finally caught on to the fact, reported here on Monday, that Boris has snorted coke and smoked dope.
On ITV London Tonight he’s just been trotting out the completely hypocritical ‘defence’ that the drugs he took were somehow not as bad as the drugs today’s kids take - as if today’s kids are somehow more depraved and have actively sought debatably stronger drugs for the sake of behaving more rebelliously than Boris and his friends ever did, as I covered on Monday.
But setting aside the charge of hypocrisy, I - courtesy, perhaps surprisingly, of the Evening Standard - can go one better: his excessively strongly worded denials about cocaine this morning have left him open to charges that he has simply started lying about it now:
Janet: You said in interviews that you’ve snorted coke.
Boris: Well, that was when I was 19. It all goes to show that, sometimes, it’s better not to say anything.[…]
In 2005, he joked on the quiz show Have I Got News For You: “I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose. In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.”
But then, in an interview with GQ magazine in June 2007, when he was asked whether any of the Class A drug went up his nose despite the sneeze, Boris responded: “It must have done, oh yes, but it didn’t do much for me I can tell you.” He added: “I tried it at university and I remember it vividly. It achieved no pharmacological psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever.”[…]
But let me repeat his denial of this morning: “To say that I had used cocaine is simply not true.”
It might, at this point, be worth pointing out that Boris was sacked from the Tory frontbench by former Tory leader Michael Howard in 2004 not for having an affair, but for failing to tell the truth about it…
Indeed - there’s no doubt Boris has form as a liar. A timely reminder of his affair, too - I didn’t see any suggestion that any of Ken’s children came from, shall we say, simultaneous relationships!
And while the media have today grouped together the revelations about the two candidates, let’s not forget one key difference that can easily be overlooked amid claims and counter-claims about whether candidates’ personal lives matter in elections: by smoking dope and snorting cocaine, Boris Johnson was breaking the law.
Here’s hoping his drug-taking doesn’t play well with his the more traditionally conservative end of his supporter spectrum.