What do sugar and cocaine have in common?

Stephen Fry is a national treasure whom half the nation can’t stand. He drops his façade of loveability mid-chortle as soon as Brexit is mentioned. He threw a spectacularly pompous Remainer wobbly a few weeks ago and I remember thinking: is he determined to make the people he disdains actively hate him?

If so, it’s working. Last weekend Fry was on John Cleese’s GB News chat show, talking about his former cocaine habit and its connection to his adolescent consumption of sugar. He mentioned the sweets in the shape of cigarettes that were sold at his school tuck shop. As he put it: ‘When I was a teenager, I had this vast empty hole in me that said, “Feed me, I need this sugar, I need it.” When it wasn’t sugar, it became tobacco, so I smoked, and then in my twenties it became cocaine. I just couldn’t sit still. It’s that addictive impulse.’

At which point Fry-haters on social media shrieked like toddlers who’ve overdosed on Sunny Delight. ‘He’s blaming sweets? I ate candy cigarettes as a kid, and I’ve never taken cocaine in my life!’ I must have read 50 variations on that single point – do such haters never scroll through the previous comments? – with the occasional homophobic sneer thrown in. If these people know one thing about cokeheads, practising or retired, it’s that they like to snivel and deflect the blame for their own lifestyle choices. The bien pensant Billy Bunter, who went to public school and Cambridge, thinks it’s all the fault of his tuck shop! You couldn’t make it up.

Actually, many of Fry’s critics were making it up. It’s true that cocaine users tend to snivel; so would anyone who’s just snorted a mixture of talcum powder and toilet scrub sold to them as Peruvian flake.