The real problem with Michael Gove’s drug admission

The problem for Michael Gove is not that thousands of Conservative party members will open their copy of the Daily Mail this morning and think to themselves: ‘Gove has taken illegal drugs, therefore he is unfit to be Prime Minister’. It is that Gove or his supporters will fall into the trap of trying to turn his admission into a virtue. How tempting it will be for them to try to say: ‘look, all Govey’s done is what millions of other students have done. That makes him a normal human being – unlike all these swivel-eyed moralists who would condemn him for it’.

But that is what would be fatal to Gove’s chances of winning the Tory leadership. No, it isn’t normal behaviour to take class A drugs – not as a student and not as professional in your early 30s, as Gove was when he snorted his coke. Coke might be widely used among the London media set, and in banking and legal circles too.