Wait – did Boris Johnson just talk about cocaine? Has the former Bullingdon stalwart, current mayor and possible future Conservative prime minister broken the most elementary rule for any aspiring senior politician and spoken about the marching powder from La Paz? Er, sort of.
Now he’s on the road to No 10, Johnson has managed to get this issue out of the way early, turning it into a shower of pixie dust with a pert quip that makes the non-inhaling Bill Clinton look like an amateur. Reading Johnson’s remarks is like witnessing Harry Houdini disappearing into a coffin wreathed in chains that is then dunked in the Thames, only to see the grinning scamp appear on Westminster bridge five minutes later, bone dry and in full evening dress.
Johnson told the Observer’s Elizabeth Day he was offered what was “alleged” to be cocaine at university; he made a daft attempt to snuffle it up but it was almost certainly just icing sugar. He had been duped! What a lovable (and legal) chump.
Speaking of the incident, he said, drolly: “That was, I’m afraid, my sole experience of icing sugar. I have never tried to take icing sugar again. Nor would I recommend icing sugar to any young person.” So if any contemporary has the bad taste to remember this event, or one like it, even post-Oxford – well, it was the icing sugar hoax. Future PR strategists will call it the Tate & Lyle ploy.
Movies and TV have certainly established cocaine as the uniquely bad drug. Smoking a spliff can be an adorable, stoner thing to do. Or maybe you’re a bohemian oldster with multiple sclerosis. Taking LSD means you’re a picturesque hippy about to embark on a U-certificate acid trip. Even crystal meth has a kind of Breaking Bad cachet. But cokeheads are always the bad guys.
Yet the ultimate irony is that in the real world they are almost always duped. Their powder is mixed with something innocuous (icing sugar, perhaps) to pump up dealers’ profit margins. The whole cocaine scene is arguably a giant placebo effect maintained by wealthy people who need to reassure themselves they haven’t been conned. Maybe even Stephen Fry was legal in those Buckingham Palace loos. To paraphrase Robin Williams: Johnson’s icing sugar is God’s way of telling you you have too much money.
Lights out
The great thing about smartphones is that they provide us with new social mores. It used to be that in cinemas people called “usherettes” with little torches directed firefly-soft lights down to the letters on to the end of rows to guide latecomers. Now what happens is that people show up after the film has started and casually use the really quite powerful torch apps on their phones, with a blinding ice-white light, to look around for a seat.
There are routinely about half a dozen of them casually raking around in the darkness with their dazzling beams, saying: “Look, there’s a seat there. Next to where that bloke is holding his hands up in front of his scrunched-up eyes in agony.” They look like they should have sirens and bloodhounds as they search for escapees from Stalag Luft III. So as well as cutting out phone chat, could we cut out searchlight pain?
Blue birds
BBC2’s Autumnwatch is poised to reveal the sensational reason for the decline in starlings: they are reportedly ingesting Prozac. Millions of prescriptions have left a residue in the water supply, and the birds are suffering side-effects of libido loss and appetite slump. What next? Humans get depressed at the lack of starlings, search for a pharmacological quick fix, and so it goes on. Perhaps we should start ingesting more cannabis and Viagra to kickstart the starlings’ hunger and sex lives.
@PeterBradshaw1
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