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Public figures and private lives

Hasan Suroor

There is a danger now of the media raking up things people might have done long before they contemplated entering public life.

PRIVATE LIVES of politicians have always been subjected to greater media scrutiny in Britain than in some other European countries such as France and Germany. (In India, of course, nobody cares what a politician does outside office hours.) But there is now a danger of key-hole journalism going a step further by raking up things that people might have done long before they had ever contemplated entering public life.

On Tuesday, the fate of one of Britain's youngest and most promising politicians could be decided by an issue that has nothing to do with his professional abilities and, frankly, should be nobody's business. David Cameron, a rising star of the Tory party who has described himself as the "true heir to Blair" and wants to reinvent Conservatism in the way Tony Blair transformed the Labour Party, suddenly finds his leadership ambitions clouded by questions about whether he took drugs as an undergraduate at Oxford University many years ago.

Ever since Mr. Cameron emerged as a strong contender for the Tory leadership following Michael Howard's decision to quit after the party's third successive general election defeat in May, he has been hounded by the Right-wing media and his opponents in the party over the issue. His refusal to give a direct answer to the question has played into the hands of those who believe that silence is confession by other means.

The outcome of the first round of voting in the leadership election on Tuesday, when MPs will vote to eliminate two of the four contenders, is said to hinge heavily on whether he is able to persuade his colleagues that what he did as a young university student is not relevant now.

"There were things I did as a student that I don't think I should talk about now that I am a politician," he said when the issue first surfaced at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party's annual conference recently barely hours after making what was regarded as arguably the best leadership pitch.

Mr. Cameron's remark that he had a "normal university experience" was interpreted as an admission that, like other "normal" undergraduates, he did experiment with drugs. Later, on a BBC programme, he told an insistent questioner that he was entitled to have had "a private life before politics in which we make mistakes and we do things that we should not ... and we are all human and we err and stray."

This again was seen as an indirect confession, but critics want him to come out openly — as Prime Minister Tony Blair did when faced with similar questions about his student days. He publicly declared that he had never taken drugs in university — a claim which despite attempts to dig dirt on him nobody has been able to disprove.

It is what The Guardian dubbed the "absence of a denial" by Mr. Cameron that has allowed the tabloids and his Right-wing rivals, opposed to his "modernising vision" for the party, to step up their campaign. At the weekend, one London tabloid dug up a story about a close relative of Mr. Cameron who is reportedly being treated for drug addiction in South Africa. Rather than asking what did that have to do with Mr. Cameron's own approach to drugs, the media played up the story forcing him to issue a public statement confirming that someone "very close" in the family had had a "dreadful problem with drugs" but that it should have nothing to do with his political future.

An obsession

Clearly, Mr. Cameron is being too coy and having already indirectly admitted to doing things at university that most young people do he should take on the "rock-throwers," as The Times columnist Mathew Parris advised him — and come clean. The issue, however, is not Mr. Cameron's coyness, but the British media's obsession with politicians' private lives.

The Cameron row comes as a senior Cabinet Minister, David Blunkett, is being stalked by the media for his friendship with a young woman who, the newspapers have gone out of their way to stress censoriously, is "half his age."

As a friend of Mr. Blunkett asked: can't a lonely man even have a quite dinner with a woman without having the media snapping at his heels? Ask an Indian journalist, and he would say: "Why not?" Ask a British journalist, and he is likely to say: "Well, hmm... depends." Take your pick.

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