n my experience nearly everyone breaks the law occasionally – and I'd be surprised if the prime minister was any different
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Footage of David Cameron apparently riding his bike through a red light has been unearthed. Photograph: Getty Images
Has David Cameron ever broken the law? I hope so. He'd be a very odd sort of driver, let alone citizen, if he hadn't. Why do I even ask such a silly question? Because when challenged at PMQs over the fox-hunting ban, Cameron seemed to some listening MPs and reporters to assert (unprompted) that he never does break it.
What he probably meant, in answer to Labour's John Spellar, is that when he hunted with the Heythrop – you remember, the Oxfordshire hunt recently fined after a private £300,000 prosecution by the RSPCA – he'd not done anything illegal because hunting foxes with dogs was not banned at the time. That seems reasonable enough; this particular hunt was targeted because the Cameron link would generate headlines deemed – rightly or not – to be helpful to the anti-hunt cause.
For good measure, Cameron also slipped out a pre-cooked joke about the only little red chaps he now hunts being Labour MPs.
What happened after that is that upright citizens who have never broken the law – Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, pious MPs and assorted Fleet St journalists – started getting excited, challenging the No 10 spokesman and other top sources over Cameron's many alleged transgressions – ranging from the pot-smoking incident that got him into trouble (less than some others, it's all in the cuttings) at Eton, to more serious allegations (never quite denied) that he may dabbled in Bolivian marching powder up the road at Oxford in the 1980s.
At a stretch we could make it a class issue, I suppose (that's probably Spellar's gripe) and claim that those restaurant-wrecking Bullingdon Club hearties never get banged to rights by the Old Bill because Daddy can always make a phone call to the chief constable.
But it's less true than it was when Evelyn Waugh wrote Vile Bodies – the chippy Sun is usually on the toffs' case, aided by social media snitches – and it's not as if substance misuse is confined to one class or even gender.
I've even downed a few too many Pinot Grigios myself on occasion, though I stopped driving after doing so some years ago after an incident which might have been nasty – but wasn't – for me and fellow motorists that evening. A narrow escape and we all learn. Cameron's biographers note that he usually left Bullingdon events before they got to the glass-smashing stage. Bill Shakespeare was just the same: always went home early to polish his prose and count his savings.
But wait. The fearless Guido Fawkes has unearthed some footage of Biker Dave apparently going – here it is – through a red light or three. The bastard! I mean Guido, not Dave. How low can you get, grassing up a middle-aged man ambling through an amber-to-red light? Has ex-City-man Guido never cycled through a red light or told the chauffeur to jump a borderline red because he's in a hurry to get to an important investment meeting?
I'm afraid I've done that too, on the bike; less frequently in the car (cars can kill, as bikes rarely do), and know I shouldn't. Speeding? Yep. Dodgy parking? Jumping lights. Etc, etc. In my experience, all but the most upright citizens do it sometimes and those who don't aren't always easy to live with or necessarily safer. Context is all: speeding on a dry, empty road in daylight is not the same as speeding past a school gate at 3.30pm or through a town centre at closing time.
Skill matters too. I'm not as good a driver as I was – and I was never very good. As PM Cameron must rarely drive, so he's probably a menace by now. That must be why his chauffeur-driven limo came behind him when he was last pictured cycling for PR reasons. Now, that's a phony dodge that does stretch my tolerance.
But we all take differing views on what's a pardonable breach of the law. Drink, drugs, bikes, fast cars, horses in pursuit of foxes … you only have to list some of the issues to hear the roars of outrage on both sides of the argument. John Stuart Mill's admirable 19th-century liberal argument that we should all be free to do what doesn't hurt anyone but ourselves doesn't get us as far in the interconnected 21st century.
What view, if any, did Mill take on animal rights? I don't know; or the future NHS having to spend huge sums of taxpayers' money dealing with substance abuse which might better be spent on children's heart operations or care of the elderly? But if I have to choose between Guido Fawkes's "libertarian" sense of rectitude and Cameron's, I'll stick with Dave.