BUSH ATTACKS 1972 COCAINE ARREST CLAIM

George W. Bush, the Texas Governor and frontrunner for the Republican
presidential nomination, has attacked a new biography alleging that he
was arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession.

In Fortune Son, the biographer J. H. Hatfield claims that the elder
George Bush arranged for the records of the supposed arrest to be
expunged after making a deal with a judge for his son to perform
community service.

"It's totally ridiculous. It's not true," Mr Bush said. He added that
the claims by Hatfield, whose earlier works include the X-files
Encyclopaedia, were simply "science fiction".

Hatfield does not name his sources, identified only as a former Yale
classmate of Mr Bush and an unofficial political adviser, or the
Republican judge in Houston whom he claims agreed to expunge the young
Mr Bush's record "after he worked as a youth counsellor for several
months".

Carol Vance, a Texas lawyer who was the district attorney at the
relevant court in 1972, also denied that Mr Bush was arrested on drug
charges. "I would have known about any such charge had such a thing
occurred," Ms Vance said.

Mr Bush did perform community service in Houston in 1972, but the
elder George Bush has said he referred his son to the youth centre
after an incident in which George W. Bush drove drunk with his brother
as a passenger.

Hatfield claimed that, thanks to the intervention of the unnamed
Republican judge, Mr Bush got away "with a little community service at
a minority youth centre instead of having to pick cotton on a Texas
prison farm".

Mindy Tucker, the Bush campaign spokeswoman, pointed out that there
were no Republican judges in Harris County until 1979. But Hatfield
insisted that the time spent by Mr Bush at the Martin Luther King Jr
Community Centre did not fit into the pattern of his early life.

"Why, all of a sudden, would you quit flying your planes, quit
drinking, quit chasing women and go mentor inner-city black kids?" the
biographer said in an interview with Salon, the Internet magazine.

The Bush camp responded swiftly to Hatfield's claim. "He's obviously
trying to sell books by peddling something that is completely false
and untrue," Scott McClellan, a Bush campaign spokesman, said.

Hatfield, however, was sticking to his claims yesterday. "I stand by
my story and I stand by my sources," he said.

Mr Bush has publicly stated that he has not used drugs for 25 years
but he has consistently refused to address questions about possible
earlier drug use.

The new, unproven claims are unlikely to make a serious dent in the
Bush campaign, but they coincide with the first polls showing that the
Republican's lead over Vice-President Al Gore, the leading Democratic
contender, has narrowed sharply.

Mr Bush remains far ahead of the Republican pack, but a new survey by
Pew Research Centre shows him just seven percentage points ahead of Mr
Gore, where last month's polls gave him a lead of up to 15 points.

Earlier this week he lost the endorsement of Guy Molinari, a former
congressman who is now president of the New York borough of Staten
Island. Mr Molinari, one of the earliest and most active supporters of
Mr Bush, said he was switching his allegiance to a rival Republican
contender, Senator John McCain, out of a desire to "place principle
above politics".

The White House has also started to take a more active anti-Bush
stance, demanding that he state whether or not he supports Republicans
in Congress accused of isolationism and partisanship by President Clinton.