The revelation that at least seven cabinet members "did pot", as the Sun puts it, excites the Times today. It publishes a photograph of the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, playing a drinking game while at Oxford. She is wearing pyjamas and making rabbit ears with her hands.
"Jacqui Smith was regarded by fellow students as a serious, hard-working girl from an unfashionable part of the country and as far from a dope fiend as any of them could be," says the paper.
Fortunately, there are other ways to put the boot into a cabinet minister.
"Posh people had proper drugs and voted SDP. Labour and Tories drank lager and had the odd spliff," a contemporary confides. She was a keen rower and ran for the presidency of the student union in 1984.
"She was an all-round college girl. That's why she lost the presidency because she didn't have any profile outside her own set. She relied on the Labour label to win. Hertford College and the Labour Club. That's dull and duller ... Cannabis was the limit for a working-class girl."
"Jacqui Smith was brought up in the Midlands town of Malvern," explains the paper. "Her father was a headteacher and her mother an economics teacher. She attended comprehensive school." Ah, that might explain it.
The revelation was greeted with shrugs of indifference in the blogosphere. Conservative blogger Iain Dale was so disgusted by Sky News's coverage that he switched over. "The only relevant question here is this. Does having smoked a joint at university impair a politician's judgement 25 years later? ... Just for the record," he adds, "I have never taken an illegal drug for fear that I might actually enjoy it if I did."
* This is an extended extract from the Wrap, Guardian Unlimited's digest of the daily papers.
