'DIDN'T EVERYONE DO DOPE AT COLLEGE?'

The new Director of Public Prosecutions isn't the first member of the
Establishment to admit to 'youthful indiscretions'. Stephen Robinson reports

It is known to the legions of British middle-class narcotic lags as the
"channel of shame", and our new Director of Public Prosecutions will have
to run this gauntlet the first time he is called to Washington for a summit
about the "war on drugs".

Cannabis: 'quite hard to avoid' in the Seventies

It is a poignant image. The British Airways jumbo will be taxi-ing on the
tarmac at Dulles airport. Kenneth Macdonald's fellow passengers in Club
will have smugly ticked the "no" boxes on their visa waiver forms,
confirming they have never been a member of a Nazi party, convicted of the
crime of genocide, or plan to import a piece of fruit into the United States.

As he walks through to the arrivals hall, Macdonald's mind will flit
guiltily back to the carefree days of Oxford in 1971, when he sent a tiny
quantity of cannabis to a friend in Salisbury, and ended up in Oxford
magistrate's court with a fine of ?75.

This is how another "youthfully indiscreet" convicted cannabis user
describes the moment of embarkation in the United States. Like Macdonald,
he picked up his criminal record while a student at Oxford. High on life,
this friend, who now lives blamelessly on the fringes of Dartmoor, puffed a
little too conspicuously on a joint in a pub. When the landlord summoned
the police, he was found to have a tiny stash in his pocket. It was a
trivial enough offence, but one this friend has had plenty of time to rue.

"You have to get a visa every time you go to the States, and because you've
had to tick the prior convictions box on your entry form, you are
invariably directed down the channel of shame to the immigration
supervisor's office. There you sit, with all the Nigerians and bin Laden
suspects, praying the supervisor takes pity on you and lets you through."

Fellow members of the "Tony crony" club, from which Kenneth Macdonald QC
emerged to take on the ?145,000-a-year DPP role, were quick yesterday to
support their man. "Everyone has done it in their youth," they said, and
indeed that is so.

The generation that now forms our Establishment came of age in the
Seventies, and few of our current leaders were able or inclined to insulate
themselves from the influences and substances of their formative era. It is
a striking thought that all those Britons who were convicted of that
generational offence of smoking pot in the Seventies have to travel to
America these days to feel the slightest sense of opprobrium.

Three years ago, when Ann Widdecombe wackily announced a new Tory "zero
tolerance" policy towards cannabis, backed up by ?100 spot fines, the
shadow cabinet tripped over each other in their desperation to declare
their "youthful experimentation", before they were turned over by the tabloids.

"It was quite hard to go through Cambridge in the Seventies without doing
it a few times," protested Francis Maude. Oliver Letwin, the civilised
voice of Tory tolerance, also came clean, and rather brilliantly trumped
Bill Clinton's tortuous "I didn't inhale" explanation during the 1992
presidential campaign. Letwin confessed he had unwittingly used cannabis
while at Trinity, Cambridge, when some mischievous undergraduate pusher
sneakily put some in the Letwin pipe, and watched him smoke it.

When Michael Portillo declined to join his fellow Conservatives in saying
whether he had ever used cannabis, the ghastly suspicion spread around
Westminister that the Tory pretender was actually too uncool to have tried
it during his years at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

In a way, the strangest aspect of Macdonald's forced confession is that he
acted so ashamed by omitting to mention it until challenged. True, his
office did put out a statement on Wednesday night owning up to the cannabis
and that other quintessentially middle-class offence, speeding. But his
apparent candour was forced upon him by a call from a Daily Telegraph
sleuth on London Spy, which had exclusively learnt of Macdonald's
undergraduate indiscretion. Only then did his press office whirr into
action, and feed the news to the rest of Fleet Street.

The reaction in yesterday's newspapers was generally muted, not least
because most journalists know they inhabit glass houses on this issue.
Rosie Boycott, who is lauded on the website skunk.co.uk ("dedicated to the
finer aspects of living") for her commitment to the decriminalisation
cause, kept a cannabis plant in her office while editor of the Independent
on Sunday. She used it as a symbol of her paper's commitment to get the
cannabis ban lifted.

Oliver Letwin, now the shadow home secretary, downplayed the significance
of Macdonald's cannabis conviction, and rightly so, given his own
unfortunate experience at Cambridge. Rather, he suggested the real issue
was that the new DPP, an old friend and colleague of Cherie Blair, lacked
the all-round legal experience for the important post.

But surely, Letwin is missing the point. If we are to be governed by a
ruling class that has smoked dope, why shouldn't we be prosecuted by a man
who ended up before an Oxford magistrate, and even now has to walk the
channel of shame?