Is the smoking dope admission going hurt or aid the Tories?

These are some of the early front pages. What’s the impact going to be?

The most positive feature for Cameron is that after weeks and weeks of hardly getting any coverage the Tories are back on the front pages. He has never denied taking drugs so the “hypocrite” charge will be hard to stick.

Looking at the way Barack Obama dealt with his youthful indiscretions there really is a case for getting these things out into the open at an early stage. Things like this are bound to come out..

An interesting counter-factual might be “would he have won the Tory leadership so convincingly if this had been known in October 2005”. Who knows? It might provide a further weapon for the party’s headbanging wing to beat him with.

From a personal perspective the drug issue that most concerns me is the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage’s active campaign FOR passive smoking. My lung capacity has been reduced after suffering two blood clots and I am ultra sensitive about the cigarette smoke that Simon Heffer’s friend, Farage, wants to inflict on me.

One of the great achievements of the Labour government will have been to make Britain largely smoke-free.

Mike Smithson