2 Monday April 4 2022 | the times
times2
W
hat is it about
the Tories and
cocaine? It
seems to hang
around them in
the air, like an
obfuscating
powder cloud, drifting slowly from one
luckless soul to the next. We’ve had
Boris Johnson, interviewed by GQ,
claiming of cocaine, “I tried it at
university and I remember it vividly.”
(He had previously said that the
substance had been up his nose, down
his nose and maybe it was icing sugar!)
There was Michael Gove opining
about his “deep
regrets” for
taking cocaine
“20 years ago”.
And then there
were the cocaine
allegations slung
at David
Cameron in
Lord Ashcroft’s
book Call
Me Dave, that
the drug was
in “open
circulation” at
the former PM’s
home. And long
before that,
remember the
Labour MP Dennis Skinner being
tossed out of the House of Commons
in 2005 for claiming that George
Osborne (he called him “boy George”)
and “the rest of the Tories” were doing
“lines of coke” in the 1980s? Osborne
has denied the allegation.
It seems, alas, that the Peruvian
marching powder is back on the Tory
menu, and is alleged to have been
consumed at a furious rate by the MP
David Warburton. The suspended
backbencher is accused of various
misdeeds, including an undeclared
£100,000 loan from a Russian
businessman, sexually harassing two
female former aides, and a disturbing
penchant for cocaine — a woman who
met him “through politics” has said
that he asked her to order some on his
behalf and snorted “line after line after
line”. Ah yes, I believe that’s why they
call cocaine the Viennetta of Class A
drugs — one line is never enough.
All these allegations will be dealt
with by parliamentary officials (an
investigation is under way) and
Warburton has indeed claimed, “I
have enormous amounts of defence.”
And he certainly did not add, “I keep it
right next to my enormous bags of
Charlie!” While outcomes are decided,
I can only say that I began to doubt
Warburton’s credibility when I saw his
“before and after” weight-loss pics.
They are a modern pestilence, the
before and after shots, clogging up my
social media feeds, from friends and
famous folk alike who’ve dropped
weight, got ripped and want you to
know all about it. In Warburton’s case,
he posted pictures on Twitter last
January, detailing his eight-stone loss
and how he
achieved his now
78 per cent
muscle mass —
“Lots of
treadmill and
weights.. and,
er, gin.” (And
certainly not “er,
gin and coke”.)
He signed off
with, “Who
knew it would
be fun.. !?”
That’s the red
flag right there.
It’s that passive-
aggressive mania
you get from all
weight-loss addicts. It’s fun! It’s great!
Look at me! I’m living my best life! I’ve
created so much excess dopamine
from repeatedly lifting a metal weight
up and down that it’s gone straight to
my brain, clouded my judgment and
made me confuse happiness with
being fantastically boring.
I’m jealous, of course. I could do
with losing a stone (my youngest calls
me “fat dad”) and I can think of
nothing better than striding into the
sea this summer with bulletproof abs.
Last year I did an online “six-pack
workout” with my eldest; he achieved
remarkable definition within weeks, I
quit after five days with back pain.
However, I fear the person I’d
become if transformed by weight loss
and workouts. It’s a devil’s bargain.
What is taken away in superfluous
blubber is replaced by a certain kind of
blank inscrutability. I’ve never met a
health fanatic who wasn’t, in some
way, dead inside. I dunno. If only there
was some substance they could take to,
you know, liven them up?Kevin Maher
Keep off
Instagram,
Andrew
Looks like Prince
Andrew’s put his foot in
it yet again (going for
the record?), by sharing
his reflections on the
Falklands conflict using
the Instagram account
of his ex-wife, Sarah,
Duchess of York. He
said that he cried a
“full weep” for war
victims everywhere,
which appalled many
observers who deemed
the message insensitive,
arriving just weeks
after his £12 million
payout to Virginia
Giuffre Roberts.
The posts were
deleted within two
hours, which, under the
circumstances, was the
right thing to do. In
fact, it always is. You
can never delete too
many posts.
I’m an inveterate
social media deleter. I
feel a guttural response
to a story du jour, and I
just fire out something
random about Will
Smith or JK Rowling
and trans rights. And
then I remember that
Twitter is a sewer, that
rational debate is dead
and that, crucially, as
an overprivileged white
male my opinions have
been forced down
society’s throat for
more than 2,000 years
so it’s my turn to shut
up and listen. And so I
post a picture of my
dogs instead.
Although, if you’re
reading this, Andrew,
the world probably isn’t
ready to “like” a snap
of you petting the
Queen’s corgis.What’s in
my junk
mail folder
homework”? It would
seem that way if
you’re one of the many
rule-breaking clowns
in Downing Street
who “initially missed”
their Partygate penalty
notices because the
emailed fines landed,
ahem, in their, ahem
ahem, junk folders.I’m not sure how
their junk folders
operate, but right
now I can find nothing
more significant in
mine than a phishing
email from “Sharon”
(she wants me to
send her money), a
25 per cent discount
offer from a hotel inNew York that I visited
in 2007, and a one-
click-away promise to
reveal the “extension
secrets” (me neither)
of a “German Adult
Film Star”.
Still, the next time
I get my biannual
tax demand from
HMRC...Is “sorry, it was in my
junk folder” the new
“my dog ate my
It may have been a ‘fun’
way to lose weight, Dave,
but I’m not impressed
O
n July 4, 2012, I
flew from London
to Nice. As my
British Airways
flight banked over
the Mediterranean,
I was envious of the
people around me
— they wore shorts and sandals, their
vacations just beginning.
I was wearing a suit.
I was headed to the annual meeting
of the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA).
The OSCE PA was made up of
hundreds of parliamentarians from 57
countries who met to discuss human
rights, democracy and security. That
year, they were meeting in Monaco,
a short drive from Nice. I was going
because they would be voting on a
resolution urging all OSCE member
states to pass Magnitsky Acts
[legislation sanctioning Russian
individuals involved in corruption,
named after lawyer Sergei Magnitsky
who died in Russian custody] in their
home countries.
I’d been invited by the
Parliamentary Assembly’s secretary
general, a Texan named Spencer
Oliver. I thought I would spice things
up by presenting a short YouTube
video we’d made about Dmitry
Klyuev [the head of an organised
crime group].
No single person was more
emblematic of the merger between
Russian organised crime and the
Russian government than Klyuev,
which made him the perfect person
to explain the necessity for a
Magnitsky Act.
However I was not looking forward
to visiting Monaco. Since 2008, I’d
been on Russia’s domestic wanted list.
It was only a matter of time before
they placed me on their international
one as well. When that happened, I
wouldn’t find out about it until I was
arrested at some border crossing. For
this reason, whenever I crossed aninternational border, my heart always
beat faster. This fear was particularly
acute in Monaco.
Prince Albert, Monaco’s head of
state, was notoriously chummy with
Vladimir Putin. He was the only
foreigner on the 2007 Siberian hunting
trip that produced the infamous
picture of a shirtless Putin fishing.
Prince Albert enthusiastically
supported the Russian president and
occasionally did his bidding. I’d heard
stories about Putin’s enemies checking
into Monaco hotels, presenting their
passports, and finding themselves
arrested within minutes.
I had a workaround, though. Since
there’s no border control between
France and Monaco, I could stay on
the French side without hitting any
legal tripwires. I chose a hotel in a
French town only 15 minutes from
Monte Carlo. It was still risky for me
to set foot in Monaco, but because I
would be attending an international
government symposium, I presumed it
would be too scandalous to touch me
at the actual event.
On July 5, I met my colleague Mark
Sabah for breakfast. Mark was an
enthusiastic 35-year-old made for
lobbying — a natural extrovert who
had no reservations about striking up
a conversation with anyone.
After breakfast we took a taxi to
Monte Carlo’s convention centre,
the Grimaldi Forum. We made our
way to a large conference room,
arriving 20 minutes early for
our screening.
By the time the lights dimmed,
there were easily 100 people in
attendance, including roughly 50
members of parliament from more
than a dozen countries.
The film began. It highlighted
Klyuev’s criminal record, his
miraculous avoidance of jail time, his
cosiness with the Russian interior
ministry, and the fact that he and his
associates were surrounded by dead
men who’d conveniently been blamed
for their crimes.In an extract from his explosive book,
the financier Bill Browder reveals the
dark arts Moscow tried to use on him
The day I
almost fell
for a Russian
honeytrap in
Monaco
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