WHY DIDN'T YOU KNOW, MR. STRAW?

Jack Straw looked and sounded remarkably cheerful in the interview he gave
to John Humphreys on radio 4 and Sir David Frost OBE, on BBC1 yesterday.

No doubt the Home Secretary was simply making the best of it but perhaps he
ought to be careful about taking our "Don't blame yourself - it could have
happened to any of us" tolerance as a sign that he's out of the woods
completely.

He has left many wondering why a Home Secretary who has campaigned against
drugs since he was at university, and is chairman of the governors at his
son's school, can have failed to know what the boy was allegedly doing in
his spare time.

Mr Straw and his family live in a relatively safe, middle-class world in
which children sometimes experiment with soft drugs without destroying
their lives. We're not talikng here about impoverished youngsters who
injure and steal from others to finance drug-taking.

Pressed about how dangerous cannabis really is, Mr Straw referred
revealingly in both interviews to a piece in The Spectator about
middle-class drug-taking Writer Tobby Young said drugs had turned him into
a zombie and Mr Straw quoted him approvingly.

Interesting as it was, the article had little to do with the real social
problems caused by drugs. Mr Young's family is cultured and affluent.
He's intelligent enough to come to his own conclusion about drug use.

If those who tried soft drugs were all like him - or like William Straw,
the Home Secretary's son, who has a place at Oxford - the argument for
legaalisation might be had to resist.

But legalising drugs would make many poor youngsters from broken homes
virtually impossible to educate, and thus unemployable. In other words, a
new burden on the welfare state.

Jack Straw's position is delicate. He can no longer speak out about drug
use and the young without making a reference to his son, or having others
do it for him. His authority has been damaged.

What he should say - and what he dare not say - is that for prosperous,
professional families, teenage experimentation in the drugs culture is a
more containable problem than dope using and dealing on council estates.