I would have been appalled if they had done anything else. Mr Hague's intervention, in a series of television interviews, comes amid growing criticism of the zero tolerance policy. The problem in this country with drugs is related largely to heroin and cocaine. The drugs strategy we have, laid out over 10 years, directs our attention to that. Meanwhile another former chief constable, Francis Wilkinson, the former head of Gwent police, echoed yesterday's call by the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, for the decriminalisation of cannabis.
Cannabis is on the wrong side of the dividing line.
It needs to be moved across to the legal drugs side. Leave things like crack cocaine and heroin on the other side so that they are separated, so that cannabis is not a gateway through the same suppliers into harder and more dangerous drugs. The admissions by Conservatives including the shadow foreign secretary, Francis Maude, and the leader in the Lords, Lord Strathclyde, that they had used cannabis threw the Conservative party into disarray. They are being widely interpreted as an attempt by the more socially liberal wing of the party to undermine Miss Widdecombe. Asked whether he could deny it, he made no response.