David Cameron revelations revive questions about drink and drug abuse

Tory leader David Cameron has said in a personal interview with the women's weekly magazine Grazia that he drank "too much" as a teenage schoolboy at Eton. The admission appears to be a ploy to head off attempts by Labour to make his youthful indiscretions an issue at the next general election.

"When I was 14, 15, 16, I was doing things that teenagers do in terms of drinking too much, being caught having the odd fag, things like that," he told the magazine.

Cameron did not detail what exactly he meant by "too much", nor what the "things like that" might have involved, which many political commentators say is typically evasive of him.

When asked by Andrew Rawnsley during the 2005 Conservative leadership election whether he had been a "party animal" at Oxford, he replied: "I'm human enough to have done all these things, but I'm too much of a politician to tell you what they were."

Pressed by Rawnsley to answer the drug question directly, Cameron said: "I had a normal university experience; let's put it that way." He also told a BBC Question Time audience: "I did lots of things before I came into politics which I shouldn't have done. We all did."

However, the Tory leader did not deny claims in a 2007 biography that he had smoked cannabis while a 15-year-old at Eton, admitting his transgression to school authorities and receiving a fine and a 'Georgic' - a punishment that entailed copying out 500 lines of Latin text. Because he owned up to the offence he escaped an expulsion which would surely have killed his political career stone dead.

After progressing from Eton to Oxford, Cameron was a stalwart of the Bullingdon Club, a university drinking society that was notorious for heavy drinking, and boisterous and destructive behaviour. This association returned to haunt Cameron and fellow member Boris Johnson (above) when a photograph of Bullingdon members in their tailcoats was widely published across the media.

With an election due in the next year and his party streets ahead of Labour in the opinion polls (41-25 per cent in today's ICM poll for the Guardian), it's apparent that the desperate Labour government will fight as dirty as it can - confirmed by revelations earlier this year about Gordon Brown's aide Damian McBride's plans to smear the Tories through the Red Rag website.

So Cameron's dance around the topic of booze and drugs could be a dangerous game to play, not least if another interpretation of his curious use of language in Grazia is considered. A fag at Eton is a younger boy who acts as a general slave to an older pupil. If Cameron did indeed "have a fag" while at the nation's top school, interest in his youth will explode. ·