CAMERON DID SMOKE CANNABIS

David Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton College
when he was involved in the school's worst-ever drugs scandal, it has
been revealed.

Police were called in and seven pupils were thrown out after boys were
caught dealing in and smoking cannabis.

The future Tory leader - who until now has refused to say if he took
drugs - was caught after another pupil informed on him. Cameron, who
at the time was just 15, was hauled in by the headmaster, who forced
him to admit he had smoked cannabis.

The furious master punished him by putting him under the top public
school's equivalent of house arrest by being 'gated'.

But this did not stop Cameron's drug-taking, according to a book to
be serialised exclusively in The Mail on Sunday next month. It says he
carried on smoking cannabis when he went to Oxford.

The disclosures in the book - Cameron, The Rise Of The New
Conservative - are bound to reopen the debate about drugs policies in
Britain.

If he wins the next General Election, Mr Cameron will be the first
Prime Minister to have admitted taking drugs.

Mr Cameron repeatedly refused to answer questions during his
successful Tory leadership campaign 18 months ago on whether or not he
had taken drugs. Westminster was rife with rumours that he had smoked
cannabis and there were claims that he had experimented with cocaine.

Mr Cameron insisted he had a right to stay quiet on the issue in spite
of making a series of provocative calls to liberalise drugs laws.

He hinted he had taken drugs by saying he had had a 'normal'
university life, but insisted his right to privacy meant there was no
need to give more details.

The dramatic development will be seized on by Labour's heir apparent
Gordon Brown, who has issued a clear public statement that he has
never taken drugs.

It will also provide ammunition for a hard core of Right-wing Tory
enemies who will see Mr Cameron's youthful flirtation with drugs as
further proof that he is too liberal, politically and personally, to
be a successful Conservative leader.

In a bizarre twist, one of the pupils who was expelled in the drugs
scandal, Josh Astor, is related by marriage to Mr Cameron's wife,
Samantha - and has links with Mr Cameron himself.

Astor is the adopted son of ex-Tory MP Michael Astor, the uncle of
Samantha's stepfather Lord Astor, one of Cameron's front-bench spokesmen.

Long after the Eton scandal, Astor went on to be imprisoned for a
drugs offence. He currently has two homes, one a few streets away from
the Camerons' West London home in Notting Hill and a second in
Chipping Norton in Mr Cameron's Witney constituency in
Oxfordshire.

The new book, to be published by Harper Collins on April 2, describes
how Mr Cameron came within a whisker of being thrown out of Eton in a
drugs scandal in 1982.

A number of pupils were found to be both using and distributing
cannabis, it says. Normally, such incidents were dealt with internally
by the school to avoid damaging publicity. But this was far too serious.

Headmaster Eric Anderson, who ten years earlier had taught Tony Blair
at Fettes, Scotland's equivalent of Eton, called in the police. The
scandal was reported by several national newspapers, though Cameron
was never named.

The book says: "The police oversaw an investigation by the school
apparently determined, at least at first, to root out all drug users.
The initial culprits were called upon to reveal to whom they had sold
drugs, an offence that ensured automatic expulsion. On the first day,
seven were summarily thrown out and the investigation began to snowball."

Pupils were in a state of panic as drugs-squad police searched their
rooms and hauled two suspects to the police station to be interviewed.
It was reported that pupils had obtained the drugs from a dealer in
Notting Hill, ironically where Mr Cameron lives today, though in those
days it was far less trendy.

Parties of up to ten boys would gather in a room to listen to Bob
Marley reggae records and smoke cannabis, said Press reports at the
time. Cameron was a big fan of reggae band UB40, but there is no
evidence he was at the Bob Marley dope parties.

One of the pupils who was forced to leave said: "A couple of guys were
going to Slough to buy the stuff. We were heavily leaned on to give
names. There were a lot of people involved. They tried to accuse me of
dealing in it. I told the headmaster, "If you kick me out, you'll have
to kick an awful lot of people out"."

Staff used a 'nice teacher, nasty teacher' questioning technique to
try to force pupils to inform on each other.

"They realised the numbers were much greater than they thought,' said
one former pupil. "They couldn't rusticate (temporarily expel) everybody."

Cameron's house, JF, (named after housemaster John Faulkner) was at
the centre of the scandal.

"It was on the edge of Eton with views out over the countryside and
towards the railway arches, and both domains offered handy cover for
illicit smoking and drinking,' write authors Francis Elliott and James
Hanning.

"From the house, it was possible on occasion to witness the surreal
scene of groups of two or three teenagers in tailcoats trudging back
towards the school, their purported interest in the botany of east
Berkshire temporarily sated.

"Cameron's house was just over the road from the Arts School, and the
drugs purge took a disproportionate toll on those who attended it."

Another Old Etonian expelled in the crackdown said: "It was a group of
pretty naughty characters and they tended to get into trouble."

He said the drugs clean-up was 'like a military operation' and rumours
about which pupils informed on others still caused resentment. Cameron
had kept his head down - until one of his fellow pupils named him as
being one of the drug-takers. He was summoned before headmaster Mr
Anderson who asked him point blank: Had he smoked cannabis? Cameron
made a full confession, but unlike the ring leaders, avoided expulsion.

"Because he had only smoked and not sold the drugs he was not thrown
out. Instead he was fined, gated (refused all leave) and given a
Georgic (copying hundreds of lines of Latin)."

Mr Anderson, who refuses to talk about Cameron's drug-taking, told the
authors: "We would have said, "Let's get the ring leaders" and if
there were others involved, we would have scared them off from doing
it again."

In all, seven boys were expelled, including Josh Astor, two more were
told to leave at the end of term, five were suspended and four more
were 'gated'. Cameron was in the group who were 'gated'.

The book claims Cameron's drugs shame at Eton was the reason he
refused to talk about his experience of drugs when he stood as Tory
leader in 2005.

"Fearing his offence would resurface, he chose not to answer any
questions about his drugs use. It was a decision that has brought
enduring innuendo about alleged cocaine use, but one that has ensured
that while he may have inhaled cannabis, no "drugs lies" have left his
lips,' says the book.

If the scandal had emerged then, Mr Cameron's Tory foes, who rightly
suspected his silence was to mask the fact that he had taken drugs,
would have used it to try to destroy his campaign.

Surprisingly, his headmaster's stern lecture on the perils of drug
taking did not change Cameron's behaviour. The book refers to his
'infrequent and moderate consumption of cannabis during his three
years at Oxford', though it adds he often turned down the offer of
drugs from other students.

A decade later, the Eton incident came back to haunt him when he had
another uncomfortable meeting with his former headmaster. By now, Mr
Cameron was special adviser to Home Secretary Michael Howard in John
Major's government. He arrived for dinner at Mr Howard's grace and
favour home in Belgravia to find that Mr Anderson was one of the guests.

Mr Cameron squirmed with embarrassment as Mr Anderson told how 'no boy
of his year gave him more trouble' than Cameron. Mr Cameron held his
breath, fearing Mr Anderson was about to tell Mr Howard, who took a
notoriously hard line on drugs, how his adviser was nearly expelled
from Eton for smoking cannabis. Luckily for Mr Cameron, the discreet
Mr Anderson kept his dark secret.

It was not the only awkward moment for Mr Cameron in his time with Mr
Howard at the Home Office. The book describes Mr Cameron's private
doubts about Mr Howard's crackdown on 'rave parties' where drug-taking
was rife. Mr Cameron was concerned 'not least because Samantha (then
his girlfriend) was attending exactly the sort of dance events Howard
wanted to ban'.

Mr Cameron came into contact with the world of drug-taking again when
he became a spin doctor for Carlton Communications in 1997, where one
of his jobs was to entertain media editors at TV industry gatherings.
"Cocaine use is hardly unknown at these industry gatherings but
Cameron's chosen refreshment was lager."

He panicked again in 2000 when he was adopted as Tory Parliamentary
candidate for Witney. It came after half the Tory Shadow Cabinet
caused a sensation by admitting they had taken drugs. Tory candidates
were told to give honest answers and Mr Cameron was terrified that
Witney Tories would ask him. Luckily for him, they did not.

Josh Astor features again in the book in another school expulsion
scandal when he caused trouble for Jade Jagger, daughter of rock star
Mick Jagger.

Jade was expelled from the expensive St Mary's private school for
girls in Calne, Wiltshire, where her best friend was Clare Cameron,
David Cameron's younger sister, after sneaking out of school to meet
Astor.

And when Cameron invited Clare and Jade to Oxford, there was a
hilarious misunderstanding after Jade told Jagger that Cameron had
taken them 'punting' on the river.

"The following Monday, Cameron's mother Mary received a call at home.
It was Mick Jagger, not pleased. "What's all this my daughter's been
getting up to with your son?" he demanded. "You know I don't approve
of bloodsports." Mary explained gently that his daughter had enjoyed
an entirely peaceful afternoon punting on the river."

The book also refers to a third school drugs scandal involving
Samantha Cameron's sister, Emily, who was expelled from Marlborough,
where both girls were educated, after drugs were found in her dormitory.

And it details Samantha's friendship during her years at Bristol
University with rap star Tricky (real name Adrian Thaws) and how they
spent time at the Montpelier Club, which was renowned for drug-taking
and violence, though Samantha avoided both.

But it is the book's impact on Mr Cameron's controversial political
and personal stance on drugs that will provoke most interest. At
various times since becoming an MP he endorsed a call for 'shooting
galleries' for hard-core drug-users, explaining: "Anything that helps
get users off the streets is worth considering." He said the UN should
consider legalising drugs and state-prescribed heroin and said the
legal classification of ecstasy should be downgraded.

His leadership campaign was dominated by repeated calls for him to
clarify whether he had taken cannabis and cocaine before becoming an
MP.

Mr Cameron said: "I'm allowed to have had a private life before
politics in which we make mistakes and we do things that we should not
and we are all human and we err and stray."

Asked directly whether he had taken Class A drugs, he said: "I have
said all I want to say about this. I didn't spend the early years of
my life thinking, "I better not do anything because one day I might be
a politician" because I didn't know I was going to be a
politician."

The closest he has come to admitting taking drugs was when he was
asked if he had done so at college.

"I had a normal university experience,' he said. When the interviewer
replied: "So that's a yes, then,' Mr Cameron added: "There were things
that I did then that I don't think that I should talk about now that
I'm a politician."

In a light-hearted anecdote, the book tells how media reports of Mr
Cameron and drugs caused intense fascination in the bars and clubs of
Notting Hill, which has become synonymous with his new wave of
metropolitan Tories.

It says: "One West Londoner reprogrammed his mobile phone so that,
when he receives a call from his cocaine dealer, he proudly shows his
friends the caller ID. It reads "David Cameron"."