Drink - Victoria Moore shares a pint with the political heavyweights
Unless attending an addiction clinic, you do not admit to drinking 14 pints a day. You boast about it and, when you do so, can expect to receive one of two polarised reactions: contempt or admiration. William Hague managed two more: mystification and disbelief. And then glee, as the gentlemen of the press descended on Rotherham to rout out as many landlords as possible never to have seen him order a pint, and - what a glorious excuse - to sit in pubs dressed up as Hague to see if they could match his alleged feat.
Poor Hague. He is not the first politician to court the favour of the people by bonding over a pint or two. With Boris Yeltsin, the pint or two just happened to be of vodka, which is much hipper and much more impressively hardcore than beer, and has the added advantage of being what people in Russia actually drink. Indeed, trying to be like "the people" is where the problem started for Hague. In Britain, we now drink more wine than beer, but wine has always been associated with power. In ancient Egypt, vines were cultivated and their wines consumed by the ruling elite. In medieval times, English kings gifted vineyards to monks as acts of great benevolence. When the Nazis invaded France, they took particular care of the great vineyards. The Mouton-Rothschild estate was set aside for Goering's postwar enjoyment and, during the war, apparently produced some of its greatest vintages.
Perhaps that is why Hague opted to brand himself a beer drinker. It is possible that Labour voters still put away the ale, but, even so, Hague (once again) missed the point. To understand the tastes of beer drinkers, it is sufficient to confess to enjoying the odd glass of an evening and mumbling "Good pint". Claiming to have routinely drunk 14 pints a day is the alcoholic equivalent of flexing Geoff Capes-style brawn, lumbering over to the nearest stationary lorry, proving your might by overturning it into a muddy ditch and then pretending that being the World's Strongest Man is all in a day's work. It is neither lean nor mean, just pointless.
Yet it is true that certain European cultures have always considered an ability to put away the booze to be a sign of strength and manliness. Rod Phillips, in A Short History of Wine, remarks that "the bishop of Arles, who had strong views on drinking, noted with dismay that drunks not only ridiculed those who did not drink to excess, but also expressed doubts about their masculinity". William Pitt the Younger (whom Hague has, almost certainly, harboured hopes of emulating - in the political sphere at least) was admired for drinking a reputed six bottles of port a day. Such cachet! And the rule still holds. In modern Britain, anyone who hasn't finished his drink by the time the next round comes in is a big wuss and might get his head stuck down the toilet after last orders.
The thing is, you wouldn't want to put such unthinking, callow drinkers in charge of a can of Dr Pepper, let alone a country. Alcohol is a very precise pleasure and, like a baseball hat, not something you can simply put on. How to drink it is a matter that should be given grave consideration. The ancient Greeks were as contemptuous of those who drank their wine neat (they liked to mix it with sea water) as they were of those who overdiluted it, which provides some clue as to the complexities of etiquette. If Hague were anxious that his own tastes wouldn't cut the mustard, he would have done better to take a tip from the Queen Mother, who - the old devil - consumes gin like the space shuttle consumes rocket fuel; or, better still, to follow the Conservative pedigree of Lady Thatcher (a glass of whisky before she laid her extraordinary hairdo on the pillow) or Sir Winston Churchill (prodigious quantities of Armenian brandy, presented to him by Stalin, among other things), who once said that he had "taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me". Such class.
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