Champagne Charlie and the 800lb Gorilla
I’m very glad Charles Kennedy has resigned. When he made his announcement that he has an ‘alcohol problem’ , I saw right away he hadn’t really confronted anything. Despite the huge courage it must have taken to get up and say that, he was apparently forced into that confession by party and shadow cabinet colleagues – having no choice he went out there and said he had a problem, that he’d been sober 2 months, and he was ‘dealing with it’.
There’s no possible way he could ever hope to confront and deal with his alcoholism in a job so scrutinised as that of party leader. He also did his partner and child a grave disservice by insisting he could carry on. My father was an alcoholic and died of it, in denial to the last, so I know whereof I speak and have the emotional scars to prove it. I don’t drink myself except for the occasional liqueur at Christmas, I’m petrified of alcoholism, having seen and felt what it does to people.
You weren’t fooling anyone, Charlie, you were just doing the dry-drunk thing, admitting while still denying.
So his resignation is something of a relief. Many people, including me, like Kennedy on a personal level. He comes across as a decent bloke, even though I disagree with his methods I don’t disagree with all of his aims. There’s obviously been some sort of intervention over the weekend, but I expect last night was the first night that Kennedy got a decent night’s sleep in a very long time.
In the old ‘tired and emotional’ days this would have been brushed under the carpet and Kennedy taken aside, told to resign and a quiet peerage arranged. Churchill was drunk most of the time and so was Thatcher in her latter days.
But now, it’s OK to drink 24 hrs a day – much parliamentary business still takes place in Westminster pubs and Commons bars – but heaven forbid you should be a drunk. Many of the biggest cheerleaders for relaxed licensing in new Labour are teetotal, or very nearly so, themselves. The Labour movement has a history of temperance. And hypocrisy.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, leaders of the Labour Party (Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson) recognised the need to seriously tackle the alcohol problem if they were to improve society’s conditions and the well-being of the people. In reacting to the news that New Labour wished to open the pubs for 24 hours Paul Routledge, the Mirror’s Chief Political Correspondent, wrote (April 11):
“I never expected a Labour Home Secretary to give me the freedom to have a sherbet whenever I feel like it. Labour, traditionally the temperance party, took a moral view born of the drunkenness that afflicted the late nineteenth century when the working classes got legless from binge drinking ….. Now New Labour has decided morality and business go hand in hand. It proposes pubs be allowed to open 24 hours a day as long as customers behave themselves. Oh what a brave new world but I don’t believe it. I found my way round the licensing laws but nowhere found fellow drinkers living up to the Jack Straw rules. Nor will they now. The standard defence in magistrates’ courts will be ‘sorry I got drunk’. I love the idea of all day and all night drinking but I’m terrified of reality”.
Hypocrisy abounds when the subject of drinking comes up. Which brings up the 800lb gorilla:
Well, duh, it’s George Bush, the most prominent dry-drunk in history. Throughout all the media feeding frenzy, even as commentators and pundits were asking, full of sincere concern, whether a drunk could handle the pressure of being an elected shadow, even 2nd-string shadow leader, not one mentioned Bush and the open speculation that he is either a dry-drunk or even drinking again.
Certainly recent pictures and video, and a history of silly small falls and scrapes, might lead one to think that.
‘Fell off his bike’. Yeah, right.
Let me see if I have this straight. It’s not OK be to drunk in charge of a minor 3rd party, but it’s fine to be drunk in charge of the world’s most powerful nation and have your finger on the nuclear button, and to espouse a doctrine of Presidential infallibility and power.
Whatever.
