As Ears To The House has remarked in the past, the relationship between politicians and drugs is an unusual one. There are many politicians who are happy to dabble with drugs, often whilst issuing anti-drugs sentiment in public when courting more right-wing newspapers. The drugs don’t seem to mind being injected or snorted by said politicians too.

And there is many a political leader who frequently brings up anti-drugs talk whilst presiding over political parties where their consumption is rife. Which is where thoughts turn to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. Cast your minds back to December last year, where Johnson was engaged in typical headline seeking.

He suggested in an interview that the government was planning on targeting middle-class drug users in a new crackdown – conveniently omitting to tell us how the previous 46,522 pledges to crack down on drugs went. We covered it at the time – so seven months on, what’s happened with the policy?

Er, that would be absolutely nothing. Ears To The House understands there were two reasons for the policy being dropped. The first was it would breach human rights law – it would effectively mean punishing someone for the same crime twice, when factoring in any punishment meted out by a criminal court. Human rights lawyer Mark Stephens MBE confirmed as much to Vice at the time.

As for the second? A source who was in the rave scene for decades, but is now in politics tells me it would have potentially implicated a lot of MPs – who themselves could be barred from international travel were the idea to be implemented. Hence the idea was dropped quickly – even by the woeful standards of this government…