Youthful Indiscretions

In a week when a photograph of David Cameron dressed in his Bullingdon Club attire made the headlines, I thought it would be interesting to compare his alleged, youthful indiscretions with those of the people he has faced, and continues to face, across the Despatch Box.

In the early Seventies, the Home Secretary John Reid joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, a party that then openly sympathised with the Kremlin. And he did not do this as a student, but as a tax-paying, married man in his late twenties. I certainly had formulated my politics by that age. Had he?

In 1978, Dr Reid’s predecessor at the Home Office, Charles Clarke MP, a then radical Marxist, organised the 1978 World Youth Festival, a jamboree that most seriously left wing, young politicians attended. Amongst comrades with him in Havana were future New Labour modernisers and MPs Peter Mandelson, Paul Boateng and Fiona McTaggart. Where are they now?

The Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has also travelled far across the political spectrum during her adult life. She supported Tony Benn for the Labour Deputy Leadership in 1981, when Benn represented the Left Wing of a leftward-leaning Labour Party. Today, we see her standing ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with Condeleeza Rice. Political principles?

Mrs Beckett’s predecessor at the Foreign Office, Jack Straw (pictured above on a Chilean beach) was also once a Marxist sympathiser. In the mid-1960s, he visited Chile as part of a student party. The Foreign Office report of the trip was recently declassified. In it, Mr Straw was described as “the chief troublemaker acting with malice aforethought”. During the trip, he met with the future Marxist President Salvadore Allende. He denies ever having engaged in political activity in Chile.

In contrast, the young Peter Hain (pictured being carried above) was never shy of engaging in political headline grabbing. The Northern Ireland Secretary was once publicly in favour of a unified Ireland (he has since back-tracked from this position). In 1973, he was convicted of criminal conspiracy at the Old Bailey, however, in his defence, it was related to his proactive attempts to disrupt sports tours to apartheid South Africa. Having said that, he did go on to champion that great advocate of human rights, Robert Mugabe, in his fight against minority, white rule in Rhodesia (he has also since withdrawn his support for this man). So many changes of view….

And finally to the Prime Minister. He was first elected to Parliament in 1983 on a manifesto that called for, amongst other hair-raising ideas, unilateral disarmament and the complete withdrawal from the European Union. The man, who has recently announced his support for Britain’s nuclear deterrent being replaced, was then a card-carrying member of CND. (Indeed, the possible future Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Peter Hain, remains a member of the same organisation).

My point is that everyone is capable of making mistakes in their youth. Indeed, every person should be allowed to change their minds about political issues and the appropriate way to behave. If the public and media want politicians with no past then politics will be the poorer for it. The stories about the Bullingdon Club’s behaviour, if true, are not attractive. If David Cameron was ever present at such occasions, one must remember that he was then of an equivalent age to when his opponents were calling each other ‘Comrade’.