So David Cameron smoked some dope when he was fifteen and got caught. Does anyone really care?

Should anyone care?

I don't think so. After all, I think everyone of us has done something when we were fifteen which perhaps we shouldn't have. The problem here is that the popular media is making a much bigger deal of it than they perhaps should be. We are now reaching the period in time when people in the wild and free era of the sixties and seventies are reaching the top of their political careers and we are going to see an awful lot more of this sort of thing in the future.

So lets get a sense of perspective on it now.

To quote the immortal words of the counselor on South Park "Drugs are Bad, hmkay?"

I personally don't particularly care whether David Cameron smoked dope when he was fifteen. I don't even care if he did it when he was studying at university. If he was finishing off a speech in the House and going home to hit the bucket bong a couple of times I might be a bit concerned, but I really don't believe that to be the case and I think, neither do any of the commentators on the subject.

A couple of interesting points have come up as a result of all this media attention though.

For one, David Cameron insists that politicians are entitled to a 'private past'.

Well, yes and no.

Item 6 of the NUJ Code of Conduct states that:

A journalist shall do nothing which entails intrusion into anybody's private life, grief or distress, subject to justification by overriding considerations of the public interest.

Now the main words there are 'overriding public interest', which could be a fairly nebulous concept to approach in a lot of cases, but is fairly clear cut in a lot of others.

Is your life or that of anyone else changed by the fact that we now know that David Cameron sat at school giggling like a little kid at bad jokes because he was stoned?

Does it change the thrust of any of the things he has said? Do you think it will have an effect on his dealings with foreign countries if he should ever reach number 10 Downing Street?

Of course it won't.

On the other hand however, if it were to be shown that David Cameron was recruited by Mossad while he was a student at Oxford, then things might be a bit different. But he hasn't, has he?

This doesn't strike me as being a terribly important issue. What it strikes me as is yet another example of the popular media being so desperate for a story, so anxious to brand someone with the superlatives by which they seem to exist, that an irrelevancy has been raised in the name of manipulating public opinion.

Lets move on to bigger issues shall we?