CAMERON ADMITS SMOKING 'SPLIFF' AT ETON

David Cameron was disciplined as a 16-year-old pupil at Eton for
smoking cannabis, sources close to the Conservative leader admitted
this weekend.

Cameron, who has always refused to discuss whether he has used drugs,
was reportedly caught up in a police investigation into drug dealing
at his school.

He was apparently "gated" - confined to school grounds - for two
weeks after confessing to a master.

A friend said the Tory leader and other schoolboys had been "snitched
on" by pupils who had been dealing in the drug. A total of seven
pupils were expelled following police inquiries, which are said to
have included a search of pupils' rooms by a drugs squad.

Cameron's confession of smoking what the friend called a "spliff"
saved him from greater punishment, despite his refusal to tell
masters who else was involved.

The pupils who originally obtained the drugs are said to have bought
them from a dealer in Notting Hill, the area where the Conservative
leader now lives.

According to contemporaries of Cameron, the authorities at Eton,
where fees currently stand at nearly UKP25,000 a year, were strict on
drug abuse. One said: "Housemasters were incredibly powerful. If you
were caught with drugs, it was usually pretty certain you would be expelled."

Yesterday John Faulkner, Cameron's housemaster, said: "When David
came to prominence, I decided I would stand by my custom never to
discuss former pupils other than with themselves or their parents."
Last night the Conservative party refused to confirm or deny the
report, adding that the events referred to had taken place 25 years ago.

A spokesman for Cameron said: "Politicians are entitled to a private
life before they came into politics. There is no change in David's
position on that."

Further details of the Eton incident are expected to be included in a
forthcoming biography of Cameron by two journalists that also claims
he smoked cannabis at Oxford.

The disclosure is likely to lead to fresh questions over Cameron's
past. During his campaign for the Tory leadership in 2005, he rode
out questions about drug-taking by refusing to comment except to say
that MPs had the right to a private life before they came into politics.

His stance won sympathy when his aides disclosed that a close member
of his family had been a heroin addict.

However, a senior Labour source commented: "People may dismiss this
story as schoolboy pranks, but I think we'll see in due course that
the same casual, dilettante, 'anything goes' attitude to drug abuse
still persists in Cameron 's inner circle today."

A number of senior politicians have admitted smoking cannabis,
including Charles Clarke and the late Mo Mowlam, the former Labour
cabinet ministers.

- - A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times today shows that Cameron's
Tories have maintained a consistent five-point lead over Labour for
the past 12 months, with the Conservatives on 37%, Labour on 32%, the
Liberal Democrats on 18% and other parties on 13%.

It found more than half of voters want Blair to quit now amid
evidence that the cash for honours affair is damaging Labour.