WHEN it was discovered that pupils at Eton college were using cannabis it was assumed that it would be a matter for internal investigation, with the guilty parties expelled. But when he received reports that pupils were supplying the drug within the 570-year-old boarding school Eton’s head master, Eric Anderson, knew that this was far too serious. He called in the Thames Valley police.

It was June 1982 and the pupils concerned were a few weeks away from sitting O-levels when their rooms were searched by the drugs squad. Two pupils were later questioned at the police station and seven were expelled, making national headlines. “Eton head grassed on drug boys”, read one.

For one of those involved on the periphery those headlines would reverberate more than two decades later when, on vying to becoming leader of the Conservative party, he was faced with the awkward question, “Have you ever taken drugs?”

Last night it became clearer why David Cameron may have been so reluctant to talk about the subject as claims emerged of his involvement on the edge of the drugs scandal to be published in a forthcoming biography.

Cameron was 15 when the police were called in after a small quantity of the drug was found in an Eton common room. “The police oversaw an investigation by the school apparently determined, at least at first, to root out all drug users,” the book says. “The initial culprits were called upon to reveal to whom they had sold the drugs, an offence that ensured automatic expulsion. On the first day, seven were summarily thrown out and the investigation began to snowball.”

Those expelled included Josh Astor, who is related by marriage to Cameron’s wife Samantha.

Others were called into staff offices and, while subjected to the “nice teacher, nasty teacher” technique, forced to inform on each other. One expelled old Etonian said the drugs clean-up was like a military operation.

Francis Elliott and James Hanning’s book, Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative, says teachers and police discovered that parties of up to 10 boys had been gathering in rooms at Cameron’s house, known as JF after its housemaster John Faulkner. Listening to Bob Marley and UB40 records, the boys had smoked their illicitly procured drug in the house on the edge of the school’s grounds.

One of the expelled boys tells the authors: “A couple of guys were going to Slough to buy the stuff. We were heavily leaned upon to give names. They tried to accuse me of dealing in it. I told the head master, ‘If you kick me out, you’ll have to kick an awful lot of people out’. Another pupil said: “They realised the numbers were much greater than they thought. They couldn’t rusticate everybody.”

After being “grassed up” by a fellow pupil Cameron was summoned before Anderson. He confessed immediately but, unlike seven of his smoking colleagues, he survived. “Because he had only smoked and not sold the drugs he was not thrown out. Instead he was fined, gated [refused all leave] and given a Georgic [copying out hundreds of lines of Latin],” the authors say.

In total seven boys were expelled, including Astor, the adopted son of former Tory MP Michael Astor, the uncle of Samantha’s stepfather Lord Astor, one of Cameron’s front-bench spokesmen. Two more were told to leave at the end of term, five were suspended and four more, including the Tory leader, were “gated”.

The book claims Cameron continued to dabble in cannabis during his three years at Brase-nose College, Oxford, where he became a member, together with another future Tory MP, Boris Johnson, of the Bullingdon, the elitist dining society famed for its drunken antics.

But it wasn’t until 10 years later when he was an adviser to the then home secretary, Michael Howard, that the Eton incident came back to haunt him. He arrived for dinner at Howard’s grace-and-favour home in Belgravia to find his schooldays’ interrogator present.

Cameron squirmed with embarrassment as Anderson told how “no boy of his year gave him more trouble” than Cameron. Fortunately for the ambitious adviser Anderson kept quiet about his drugs secret.

Cameron disagreed with Howard’s crackdown on rave parties where ecstasy was the drug of choice, not least because his wife Samantha, who was then his girlfriend, attended them.

He thought further embarrassment would come when he was first adopted as Conservative parliamentary candidate for Witney in 2000. Half the shadow cabinet had admitted they had taken drugs and Cameron was petrified the Witney association would ask him. They didn’t.

During his campaign for the party leadership, Cameron was dogged by repeated questions about whether he had taken illegal substances prior to winning a seat at Westminster. He stuck rigidly to the line that politicians were entitled to a private life before they were elected.

The closest Cameron has ever come to admitting drug taking in the past was when he was asked if he had done so at university.

He replied that he had had a “normal university experience”.

Last night there was a mixed reaction to the revelations about his involvement in the drugs scandal at Eton and claims he also used cannabis at Oxford.

Within minutes of the news breaking, a discussion had begun on the “open blog” section of Cameron’s website.

Many contributors posted messages in support of the Tory leader, arguing that he should not be attacked for mistakes made so long in the past.

Peter Ainsworth, the shadow environment secretary who has previously admitted smoking cannabis, said last night: “What happened 20 years ago at school seems to me to have no bearing whatsoever on what is happening today.

“People have a right to a private life. We are talking about a schoolboy here, 20 years ago. I don’t see why it is a matter of public interest at all.”

However, the controversy is likely to be seized on by right-wingers in the party, who have been dismayed by the Tory leader’s liberal approach to traditional Tory law and order issues, such as his much derided “huga hoodie” campaign.

Lord Tebbit, the former Tory party chairman, challenged Cameron to come clean about whether the reports were true. “What you do in private tends to spill over into what you do in public,” he said.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Times Christmas appeal: Letter from the Editor
• Conferences — what a waste of money
• Schools supremo learns a painful lesson