TURNING A PROBLEM INTO A FARCE

THAT, we are invited to believe, is that. The affair may have involved a
minister of the Crown, a national newspaper, the Attorney General, a key
Government policy and allegations of political censorship. Now, according
to reports, the 17-year-old politician's son accused by the Mirror of
dealing in cannabis is to face, at best, a caution.

Given that the alleged crime involved a sum of only £10, this might seem a
sensible conclusion, though we must wonder with what seriousness we are now
supposed to treat the Government's attitude towards drugs trafficking.
People such as Jack Straw, the Home Secretary and the minister responsible
for drugs policy, have long asserted that dealing is very much worse than
mere possession and the police have followed that lead. Now the offence,
albeit on a trivial scale, is being treated as something no worse than a
misdemeanour.

Perhaps we should not be too surprised, given the farce that has preceded
this conclusion. Yet if it has been a fuss over next-to-nothing - a
judgment many would, of course, dispute - it has been a fuss of the
Government's making. It has hidden behind legal technicalities to protect a
senior minister who would have done himself a favour if he had revealed his
identity at the outset. It has gagged the press in a matter of legitimate
public interest. Worse than that, it has reduced its vaunted drugs policy
to mere shambolic rhetoric.

All that being so, it is hard to see what credibility the minister in
question can hope to retain after he has been identified. He claims to be
frustrated by the anonymity forced, so he says, upon him. With the greatest
of respect, we doubt that very much, just as we doubt the Attorney
General's claim that it was necessary to gag the entire English press in
order to prevent contempt being committed.

Had the Government not avoided such punitive methods, indeed, the argument
for the boy's privacy might have been easier to respect. Instead, the
affair has been turned into an argument over press freedom and the public
interest. Yet again, New Labour has turned a small problem into a
fair-sized political crisis.

We can only hope the youth at the centre of the affair has learned his
lesson even if his elders have not. His lifestyle has scarcely been of the
sort desirable for any young man, far less a minister's son. If nothing
else he has made a small mockery of the Government's chatter about "family
values".