If nothing else, the resignation of Kerry Smith, a Ukip candidate, clearly serves as a valuable public health announcement. The party leapt to the defence of its candidate for South Basildon and East Thurrock, who had described gay people as “fucking disgusting old poofters” and called a woman with a Chinese name a “chinky”, by blaming his views on the prescription drugs he had been taking. Patrick O’Flynn, Ukip’s economic spokesman, said the remarks were made in “a phone call some time ago while he was on sedatives, by his own account, not really speaking [or] thinking rationally”. As we speak, pharmaceutical companies will be reprinting their information leaflets: may cause drowsiness, nausea, racism and homophobia.
Or perhaps not. “All that sedatives do is reduce your ability to restrain and hide your true thoughts,” says David Nutt, Edmond J Safra professor of neuropsychopharmacology and director of the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit at Imperial College London. “Politicians spend their whole lives telling people what they think people want to hear, and not what they believe. That takes quite a lot of effort. We know from brain imaging studies that lying and hiding things consumes more brainpower than telling the truth, so if people are repressing something they don’t want people to know, they have to actively work [at it]. When you are sedated, the control centres of your brain are dampened down and the underlying deeper truths are less likely to be suppressed and they come to the surface.”
Drugs cannot make you racist or homophobic: “These are deep-seated constructs that are developed over years, if not decades. Drugs can reveal them, but they don’t make them.”
Nutt says he quite likes the idea – “in vino veritas” – of the drinking parties in some ancient cultures, where “public debate was held when people were drunk so you didn’t have the intellectual capacity to lie and you had to say what you thought.” In Britain, booze was commonplace in parliament, and only relatively recently frowned on. “In 1783, William Pitt the Younger was seen vomiting behind the back of the Speaker’s chair before replying to a vital debate as chancellor of the exchequer,” writes the Labour MP Chris Bryant.
“I’m not sure I’m recommending [inebriation] but it’s worth considering,” says Nutt. “Many politicians don’t tell the truth and sedative drugs like alcohol or benzodiazepines may actually get them closer to the truth.” However, he adds that when it comes to votes, “we also have to qualify that; we have to say that intellectual judgment is also impaired”.
Short of calling for mandatory drug-taking or drunkenness (although perhaps those subsidised parliament bars could finally serve an important democratic function), inebriation of the self-inflicted variety has already proved illuminating – the best recent example is the former Tory cabinet minister David Mellor (later extremely apologetic) who after an event at Buckingham Palace was recorded calling a taxi driver a “sweaty, stupid little shit” and telling him to get “a better education”. Maybe someone should buy Nigel Farage another pint.
