Dodging the question - a hard habit to break for political hopefuls

IF I were to start, this Monday morning, by asking you if you’ve had an affair with your next-door-neighbour, the chances are you’ll say no.

This is not to suggest you’re not in demand on your road. It’s simply a statistical probability.

So you answer no. You may answer with amusement. You may answer with regret, depending on who lives beside you. You may answer with outrage.

The one certainty is that you won’t say “I live a full suburban life,” because if you did, we’d all know, sure as shootin’, that you’ve been having it off with at least one of the neighbours.

Yet Dave Cameron, bright hope of the Tory party, gave that kind of answer when asked by a journalist if he’d taken drugs when attending university.

The journalist wasn’t offering to do a drug test on him right now, nor was he suggesting Cameron was currently using. The question referred back a decade or so.

Cameron could have said: “No.” He could have said: “Yes, but it doesn’t mean I approve of it from where I stand right now,” which was essentially the dignified response the Green Party’s Eamon Ryan gave during his abortive run at the presidency. Cameron could even have used New York’s Mayor Bloomberg’s reply: “You bet I did. And I enjoyed it.” Instead, ludicrously, he replied: “I had a normal university life.” So now we know what he was at between tutorials.

Cameron’s supporters believe the answer hasn’t done him any harm. Which goes to show his supporters have as loose a grasp on reality as he does.

It’s done him enormous harm. It’s turned him into a new political type: the single non-issue candidate. It’s generated more coverage than the rest of the Tory leadership campaign in its entirety.

It certainly SHOULD do him harm. It should end his chances of the leadership. Not because he almost certainly ingested something illegal during his student years, but because nobody should become leader of a political party who can’t anticipate the bleedin’ obvious. Nor should anybody get to be a political leader who’s thick enough to think that references to “normal university life” will persuade people that he didn’t dabble in drugs, back then.

Even more important, no man or woman should become a political leader who doesn’t understand the line between when they must answer a question and when they should tell a questioner to go take a running jump for themselves.

Every journalist is convinced that once they’ve asked a question, the public has a right to know the answer to that question. Not so. The question may be very interesting, and the public might be egging to know the answer, but that doesn’t mean they’re ENTITLED to know it. Only if the public good requires an answer must one be given.

But holdon , a journalist might say, how could this man credibly support an anti-drugs policy as leader of the Tories if he’d taken drugs himself? To which the answer is: As easily as any previous leader of that party.

Throughout history, teenagers who drank, smoked and snorted anything they could lay their hands on have turned into tutting thirty-somethings when their offspring look set to do the same. Most people are glad to get out of their youth alive. They rarely want to apply their young misdeeds as the standard for the next generation. So it’s daft to suggest that having inhaled in one’s student days rules leadership out.

David Cameron doesn’t seem to have grasped this. But then, he hasn’t grasped, either, that being photographed in bare feet does not turn him into a cool contrast with the rigid “suits” fighting for the leadership.

All it does is establish that he has toes. Now, unless the rules have radically changed, toes are not a qualifier for high political office.

TOES, for the most part, are a given. We can assume toes. Some of us would actively prefer to assume them rather than have to look at them. Exposing your toes may attract the foot-fetishist vote, but how big is that? Having put his shoes back on, Cameron encountered one of the most obvious, predictable questions facing any prominent politician of a certain age: have you ever snorted, sniffed or stuck yourself with mind-elevating substances? He gave a lousy first non-answer, then complicated his problem by vague references to some addicted relative.

Involving a relative or allowing a relative to be involved in your campaign is lethal. Yes, of course, journalists whose appetite for a drug story about you will locate your mother if she’s sleeping under a bridge, your sister if she’s standing under a lamppost waiting to earn the money for her next fix or your cousin if he’s dealing at the gates of the local primary school. Confirming the essence of their story, as Cameron did, without identifying the relative, is a pointless collusive surrender.

Asked about his relative, Cameron should have told the newspaper that one member of a family being in politics doesn’t remove the right to privacy from other members of that family. Or, more bluntly, he might have echoed the inestimable Teresa Heinz Kerry and said: “Why don’t you just shove it?”

Instead, because he doesn’t know how to refuse to answer a question, he contributed to the invasive story.

Some questions should never be answered by a politician. If, for example, a journalist asks why the politician’s youngest son turns up each week at his office’s Friday piss-up wearing a spangled tutu and a fleur-de-lis tattooed on his abs, the answer has to be: “Not my business, Sunshine. And not yours, either.” The offspring of politicians are as entitled to enjoy their tutus and fleurs-de-lis as any other citizen. The tutu impact on policy-making by a parent is minimal.

Nor should politicians answer the pre-election scatter-shot questionnaire sent to every candidate in an area, inviting them tick the boxes to confirm they are for or against abortion, gay or straight, have or have not been done for drink driving. The answers, shorn of context or explanation, are then compared in print with those of other candidates. Not fair.

Here’s why.

Last winter, a non-political friend of mine exited a pub one night. He wasn’t footless, but he knew he shouldn’t drive. He slid behind the wheel, turned on the engine to keep warm, put the back of the seat down and slept. A garda, arriving a couple of hours later, did him for DUI.

Apparently, if you’re in the driver’s seat with the engine running, even if you’re asleep and supine, technically, you’re in charge of the car.

Ergo guilty.

If that happened to a politician and was later revealed by a tick-the-box answer, constituents would naturally assume him to be a dangerous irresponsible drunk, instead of the highly responsible citizen he would be. The questionnaire would unfairly damage him.

Anticipating obvious questions is baseline competence for any politician.

Civilly refusing to answer questions that are nobody’s business is honours course stuff.

And talking about having led a normal university life when asked about drug-taking gets a fail mark. The dishonesty of the reply is matched by its ineptitude.