Once, Johnny Mercer was best known as the only Conservative MP ever to appear topless in an advert for shower gel. But that may have changed, thanks to his response to a question from Radio 5 journalist John Pienaar about whether or not he has ever taken illegal drugs.
His answer – “You’ve seen the advert. You don’t put diesel in a Ferrari, do you mate?” – has instantly become both the best and worst ever response by a politician to a question about their personal drug use. Those 14 words are crammed with every conceivable emotion. There’s pride. There’s defiance. There’s vanity. There’s scorn. By some ridiculous tonal quirk, there’s both self-awareness and total obliviousness. It is everything.
Mercer’s perfect soundbite will hopefully now usher in a third wave of political drug statements. For too long, thanks to Bill Clinton’s infamous “I didn’t inhale, and I didn’t try it again” 1992 non-answer, politicians have been long content to fall back on “I tried it at university and it was horrible” as a response to questioning.
This has been done to death, albeit in a variety of entertaining ways. Norman Lamont once said: “I did eat a tiny bit of cannabis cake, and all I can say is I enjoyed the cake.” Boris Johnson admitted trying cocaine, but with the qualifier that “it achieved no pharmacological, psychotropic or any other effect on me whatsoever”. And, most baroquely of all, Oliver Letwin said: “At Cambridge, I was a very pretentious student. I grew a beard and took up a pipe. On one occasion some friends put some dope in a pipe I was smoking. It had absolutely no effect on me at all.”
To counter this slipperiness, a second wave of upfront openness has emerged. Barack Obama, writing in his book Dreams from My Father, admitted that he’d tried pot and “maybe a little blow”, while Michael Bloomberg managed to be even more direct. When asked if he’d ever taken drugs, he replied “You bet I did. And I enjoyed it”. And then, at the end of the spectrum, we have Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who genuinely once said this: “I drank too much, I smoked some crack sometime. What can I say? I made a mistake, I’m human.”
For a while, it looked as if the future of the game might have belonged to David Cameron, who has made a veritable side career from squirming and stammering whenever he’s asked about his history of drug use. Until now, the clearest he’s ever been on the matter was when he yammered: “Please, I mean, I think we’ve dealt with this issue …” during an episode of Channel 4 News, pointing to a new wave of political frantic, swivel-eyed non sequiturs.
But now, thankfully, Johnny Mercer has blown it wide open with his wonderful metaphor. Surely it can never be beaten. Surely the role of minister of state for crime prevention is now his for the taking.
