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"Your typical loyal Conservative wife" has long been a synonym in some circles for what the rest of us shirt-lifters affectionately call "fag-hags". Actually - it's a bit more than that - she is a byword for heterosexual "cover" for gay men wanting to make their way in supposedly homophobic conservative politics. Ffion Jenkins got the same when she married Willie Hague. If truth be told, the same was said of Sarah Gurling, now Mrs Charles Kennedy, and of Sarah Macaulay, now Mrs Gordon Brown.

So, it's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say "sexual confusion" and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along. Doubly, trebly in this case, tragic when there are children involved. But no more so than if he was running off with another woman. So all credit to David Cameron if he holds to his word and refuses to judge Greg Barker's political ability and future on what is a bit of a personal mess. This is, after all, the twenty-first century, and not the nineteen-eighties when his party would be condemning his new "pretend family relationship" with legislation.

Since Greg is 40, and I am approaching the same, I can identify with him in a way - certainly my feelings have changed, becoming more open to finding love in people of either gender. It's not terribly trendy to say so in the entrenched "gay community" just as much as the "heterosexist community", but we need to appreciate that sexual identity is more fluid than the last two or three hundred years' of predominantly British macho-masculine history has led us to believe.

Has he always identified in secret as "gay" but been living a double life? He's sired three children, after all. People change in all sorts of ways. Loves change. He seems no better, or worse, than anyone who, after some years of marriage, has lost the fire that was once there and fallen for someone else. The gender of his new love should make no difference to the rest of us. It likely will to his kids - just because other children can be the cruelest.

But...he did work for one of those Russian kleptocrats we grace with the term "oligarch". That's the real skeleton in Mr Barker's newly redecorated closet. And if he ends up getting fired for anything, it should be the hug-a-huskie stunt he led his boss on a few months back!

But if there are young, gay, Tories out there (I can never quite understand why) Cameron's support for Barker will I hope make them think twice about taking on a fag hag till death do they part for the sake of a selection meeting.

Whisky, and other spirits, specially distilled to take their alcohol (the chemical that provides the "high" - well, "low" actually in both cases!) content up from the usual 3-5% of beer to 40% or more, are dangerous.

Non sequitur? Indeed - we all know that you don't drink whisky by the pint by and large. But people still use spirits to get blotto as fast as they can on as little liquid as they can and for those people, yes, it is dangerous. Yet such a FUD mantra (fear, uncertainty and denial) is routinely trotted out by the twenty-first century's New Temperance League in their relentless attacks on other drugs, such as here at the First Post:

Cannabis growing hits a new high (was the pun intended I wonder?)

The plant most popular with illicit farmers is actually skunk, a hybrid cannabis plant specially bred to be more potent: whereas standard cannabis contains about one to five per cent of THC (tetrahydro- cannabinol - the chemical that provides the "high"), skunk can contain as much as 30 per cent THC, making it dangerous.

And yes, of course, like whisky when drunk by the pint it could be dangerous. Now of course, with the benefit of regulation, we know exactly what the alcohol content is of every alcoholic drink that is sold (except that scrumpy stuff that is still brewing when it hits your stomach!). But cannabis users do tend to know how to dose themselves - and you don't, indeed physically can't in most cases, sit there and smoke yourself comatose like people do with booze. Unlike with alcohol, there usually comes a point at which your body actually cannot take any more well before you're actually semi-conscious - you're "toked out" in the lingo - and you cannot for love nor money force yourself past that point, often even having to stub out a joint halfway through, so it seems much more self regulating than strong alcohol is where you can down a bottle of the stuff and pass out a few minutes later.

But all this FUD reminds me of the Untouchables and prohibition in the US. Of course in an underground market people produced the strongest most rancid hooch they could, because shipping bulk tankers of lite beer around the country was just not on. Prohibition didn't work then, so why do we think it should work now? And just like back then, there are other very real dangers - in cultivating the stronger stuff, in making it quickly and covertly, they use hydroponics with all sorts of chemicals that stick around after the plants are harvested. So not only are you consuming artificially strong stuff, but chemically tainted stuff as well. Double bad!

And thinking about strength of drugs they are fighting a losing battle on most of them - did you know, for example, that it is possible to concentrate the active ingredients of heroin to such an extent that you could pass around enough supply for an addict to live off for a month if he knew how to dilute it again properly under a postage stamp? How are you supposed to stop that sort of concentration getting past the authorities?

Conrad Russell suggested that when a law has a significant amount of the population either disregarding it or contemptuous of it, it has become de facto a bad law. The numbers of people that now appear to be involved in cannabis cultivation suggests this is now the case here if it wasn't already.

The best, nay the only way, to deal with this is to legalize and regulate it, and bugger the Temperance League ladies. Make sure that, as with tobacco and alcohol, everyone knows precisely how much of the active ingredient they are taking and then leave it up to individuals to decide whether they want a quick snifter of the strong stuff, or an evening's socializing with the old tongue loosener.

Technorati Tags: prohibition, liberty, drugs laws

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)