David Cameron has admitted how he took drugs with his wife Samantha.
The former prime minister said the couple had smoked cannabis together.
According to the Times, Mr Cameron admits getting ‘off his head’ on dope when he was a schoolboy at Eton in his forthcoming memoir.
He also apparently says he later smoked the drug with a group that included his wife and some of her friends.
However, Mr Cameron refused to answer questions on whether he had ever taken cocaine.
David Cameron has revealed how he took drugs with his wife Samantha (pictured together in 1995). The former prime minister said the couple had smoked cannabis together
Mr Cameron met with his wife, a former schoolfriend of his younger sister, Clare, on a family holiday in Calabria in 1992.
At the time she was a 21-year-old art student in Bristol while he was a 25-year-old working as an adviser for the then Tory chancellor Norman Lamont. The couple married in 1996.
A biography of Mr Cameron published in 2007 reported that he was almost expelled from Eton College for smoking cannabis.
Mr Cameron has consistently refused to answer questions about whether he ever took cocaine as a young man.
During the 2005 Tory leadership election, other candidates publicly stated that they had never used Class A drugs.
But Mr Cameron declined to give a similar statement, saying: ‘I did lots of things before I came into politics which I shouldn’t have done. We all did.’
According to the Times, Mr Cameron admits getting ‘off his head’ on dope when he was a schoolboy at Eton (pictured) in his forthcoming memoir
Earlier this year, the issue of drug use erupted in the latest Tory leadership race when the Daily Mail revealed that Michael Gove had taken cocaine on ‘several social occasions’ 20 years ago.
The revelation stalled Mr Gove’s campaign for the leadership. Boris Johnson has previously admitted taking both cocaine and cannabis.
The Prime Minister first talked publicly about trying cocaine 14 years ago, but said he had sneezed at the critical moment. However, two years later he confirmed that he had taken the Class A drug.
He also admitted he had used cannabis ‘quite a few times’ in his youth. Asked if he had enjoyed it, he said: ‘Yeah, it was jolly nice. But apparently it is very different these days – much stronger… I’ve become very illiberal about it. I don’t want my kids to take drugs.’
In his new autobiography, For The Record, Mr Cameron also goes into detail about other areas of his school years – including how he was packed off to boarding school at the age of seven.
Here he ‘lost a stone in weight during a single term’ with punishments at the school involving frequent beatings.
The revelations come ahead of Mr Cameron’s tell-all book release, For the Record, which is due to be published this month
He recalls being homesick at first, but when he arrived at Eton began to enjoy his freedom – saying he ‘loved the place’ and was very ‘happy’ during his time there.
But as he became more and more confident, reaching his third year at the college, he became involved in some questionable activities – eventually leading to, as he puts it, ‘the worst moment of my life so far’.
He writes: ‘Trouble started brewing for me in my third year due to my growing sense of being slightly mediocre, a mild obsession about being trapped in my big brother’s shadow, and a weakness for going with the crowd, even when the crowd was heading in the wrong direction.’
These things, he claims, led to him being hauled in front of the headmaster over drug use at the school. He escaped expulsion over the incident, but was fined, grounded by the school and stripped of privileges. Seven other boys were asked to leave the school.
He still ‘shivers at the memory’, and claims it is moment he’ll never forget. When he arrived at Oxford, there are things here he also regrets – including his membership of the infamous Bullingdon Club.
He ‘cringes’ over the photograph of his time there, but says stories of excessive drunkenness are exaggerated. He admits, however, partaking of an election ritual in which was woken up in the middle of the night and had his room turned ‘upside down’.