THE GUARDIAN: Learning how to down pints at a young age appears to be a vital skill for anyone hoping to be leader of the Conservative party.
In his days as Tory leader, William Hague famously boasted that he drank up to 14 pints a day as a teenager. Now, David Cameron has admitted that he drank "too much" as a teenager at Eton. To show his human side, Cameron tells Grazia magazine that he was a troublesome teenager.
"When I was 14, 15, 16, I was doing things that teenagers do in terms of drinking too much, being caught having the odd fag, things like that," he says.
The Tory leader does not go into detail about how much he drank and what precisely he smoked. Hague famously ran into trouble in 2000 when he tried to shed his image as a teenage political geek by recalling how he drank up to 14 pints a day while delivering beer and soft drinks around South Yorkshire during his holidays.
Cameron never drank that much and says he managed to turn himself round, winning a place at Oxford, where he achieved a first-class degree. "I didn't do particularly well in my O-levels, but I was fortunate enough that 16 was a turning point for me. I was, in some ways, heading in the wrong direction and I pulled myself up and headed in the right one." >>> Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent | Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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