Hygiene theatre is mostly gone now, but the habit of policing others’ choices has proven too hard to quit, and now one of its preferred targets is alcohol. This has been in the offing for some time: the temperance movement, which had struggled to shed the air of puritanism surrounding it since the repeal of prohibition in America, has refashioned itself in recent years through an emphasis on health. The first rumblings of alcohol hysteria could be detected in the relish of the abstemious when it turned out resveratrol, an antioxidant found in red wine, might not be the elixir of life it was once touted as. Then there was the clawing-back of guidelines for moderate drinking: in 2023, for example, Canada dropped its so-called “low-risk threshold” from 10 drinks per week for women and 15 for men to two or fewer for either sex.

More recently, the progressive press has jumped on the anti-alcohol dogpile, with headlines calculated to horrify. “There is No Such Thing as a Safe Level of Alcohol Consumption,” The Guardian warns us, while The New York Times, now a surrogate parent for those who stopped talking to their own parents because they voted for Trump or refused to tack a land acknowledgment onto the end of the Thanksgiving dinner prayers, chides readers virtually every day with articles like “Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health,” “Alcohol Carries New Risks in Middle Age,” and the condescending “Is That Drink Really Worth it to You?”

And worldwide, health authorities have responded. In 2026, Ireland will become the first EU country to place warning labels on alcoholic beverages. In 2024, the World Health Organization published its “Global Alcohol Action Plan” a masterpiece of bureaucratic jargon that employs the stock aims of “empowering people and communities”, “ending poverty”, and “achieving gender inequality” to encourage member states to monitor their citizens’ alcohol use, engage in anti-drinking campaigns, and ultimately reduce consumption by 20% by 2030. Finally, this past January, the US Surgeon General issued an alarmist report entitled “Alcohol and Cancer Risk”. I will not contest the Surgeon General’s findings, though they fail to include alcohol’s possible protective effects against kidney cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, dementia, and other diseases. What I will not accept is their significance. In America, it appears, alcohol “contributes” to 100,000 cancer diagnoses and 20,000 cancer deaths each year. Putting aside that the nature of such a contribution is indeterminable — and that confounding factors, which there are in virtually every case, should be a motive for caution, rather than conclusiveness — this means that alcohol is deemed to be a factor in 5% of cancer diagnoses and 3% of cancer deaths per year. These deaths constitute .006% of all deaths in the United States — significantly lower than mortality due to influenza or unintentional falls.

The report goes on to state that alcohol is the third leading cause of preventable cancers, after smoking and obesity. But smoking is the only one of these where the link is clear-cut: around 14% of smokers will develop lung cancer, with the number higher for men than for women. For everything else, it’s a guessing game, because the factors are too difficult to disentangle: if an obese drug user who binges on processed food comes down with cancer of the colon, who is to say whether one or all of these, or none, caused those first cells to mutate?

Of course, cancer isn’t the only thing you can die of, and a mere month before the Surgeon General’s doomsaying appeared, the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering released its own report on moderate alcohol consumption and health outcomes, the findings of which reconfirmed two things: first, that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of heart attack and stroke, and second, that compared with abstinence, it also correlates with a lower risk of mortality. This last datum in particular is a source of consternation to the new temperance advocates, who have tied themselves into all sorts of interesting knots to explain it away. Most entertaining of these is the “sick quitter” theory which suggests that the pool of hale teetotallers is befouled by the wrecks of ex-drinkers who gave up the bottle too late, and remain ravaged by their years of sin; if only their numbers could be excluded, the appearance of any health benefits of alcohol would vanish.

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This hypothesis is nonsense, and has been shown to be nonsense in repeated studies of lifetime abstainers; likewise, the faddish notion that moderate drinkers owe their health to their generally better socio-economic standing is not borne out by statistical data. Whence, then, the moral panic?

A hint, paradoxically, lies in the near absence of heavy drinking from these discussions. Because an alcoholic is an addict, and over the past several years, the addict has been configured as a powerless object of pity and solidarity, the alcoholic lies beyond censure; his “disease” is the likely product of trauma, and following the precepts of “harm reduction”, he must be coddled until he chooses to get better. The moderate drinker, on the other hand, is a being self-possessed, one who consciously takes a drink or two or five in full awareness of the minuscule danger, because he is enjoying himself, and would like to enjoy himself more. Contemporary progressive dogma is fundamentally anti-responsibility, placing the blame for social ills anywhere but on the subject; and the calculated risk-taker is a constant and exasperating reminder that maybe all that is bullshit, and that accepting the consequences for one’s possibly unwise actions is a basic criterion for participating in society. Moreover, as the editorializing classes have fallen for a “standpoint epistemology” according to which one’s measure of illness or trauma determined how much of a right one has to speak, the mere fact of self-composure has acquired the illiberal stink of “privilege”.

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I would put down the bottle if what I were offered in return were worthwhile, but I fear the antidote is worse than the poison. I am aware of drinking’s association with violence, sexual assault, deaths on the road, liver disease, and a host of other problems; this is what makes it a vice, though unlike the slow-motion disaster of legalized marijuana, at least it’s one we have lots of practice in handling. The harms of not drinking are harder to track, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, and their consequences are ominous for our societies. In a 2010 study, Charles Holahan, a psychologist of the University of Austin, found associations between abstinence and an enormous suite of problems: obesity, depression, avoidance coping, poor social engagement, lack of support from friends, significantly decreased likelihood of marriage. He concluded: “All of these factors that were associated with abstention significantly predicted mortality.”

Why harp on these benefits, though? The social neurosis surrounding alcohol is no more concerned with health than Covid vaccine-shaming was five years ago (I say this as a believer in vaccines, but one who feels intransigence was a moral and policy failure). And even if we take others’ alleged concern for our bodies at face value, what is health, and what is the point of it? To quote Nietzsche, “In order to determine even what health involves for your body, what matters is your purpose, your horizon, your powers, your impulses, your errors and in particular the ideals and phantasms of your soul.” Life in itself is not an unalloyed good; it is only worthwhile to the extent that it is lived; and much of what people mistake to be health is preparation for a life they never get around to starting. “Is it not,” the Swiss novelist Hermann Burger wrote about his own weakness, tobacco, “far worse, more frustrating, to have to renounce life’s most sublime pleasure hundreds of thousands of times over than to pay for decades of wishes granted with a narrowing of the vessels in old age?” Quite so, I’d say, and if you’ll excuse me, I must step away to pour myself a glass.

A new report suggests that the drinking habits of our young women outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. More than a third of young women in the UK reported being drunk at least twice by the age of 15, a figure only bested by the stats of young Danes, Hungarians, and Italians. In reality, teenage drinking is markedly down compared to former levels: in 2002, for instance, a staggering 41% of Scottish teenagers of both sexes apparently drank weekly. But in these health-conscious times, even moderate amounts of teen drinking are viewed as too much. A similarly disapproving conclusion was drawn by the World Health Organization last April, though in that case, impressively, both boys and girls in the UK came out Top of the Alcopops rather than 4th.

Worried about supposed adverse effects on brain development, and trying to explain the appeal of drinking to young women in particular, commentators tend to approach the subject of teenage kicks as if observing puzzling behavioral manifestations in an alien species. Some suggest that girls are simply copying their mothers, since British women hold the dubious honor of being Europe’s biggest female binge-drinkers. Others blame intensified feelings of social anxiety post-lockdown, targeted advertising from the drinks industry towards females, and that old fallback, middle-class parents for introducing youngsters to wine too early.

Meanwhile, no one mentions the joyfully emboldened swagger of being newly out on the lash; how feelings of effervescence intermittently course through your body as you dance, flirt, smoke, or double over in hysterical mirth at someone’s stupid joke, or your own; how, in short, you feel like a sexy superhero — until you don’t. To help me remember, I still have photographs from my first ever night on the booze at a friend’s house in Edinburgh, our parents having their own party downstairs. Groups of us loll about on the floor with our mouths in perpetual motion, talking endlessly, babyfaces hectically flushed, eyes sparkling and slightly wild. Sometimes I suspect my adult drinking patterns have been chasing that sort of fabulous high ever since.

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Film and television do slightly better, with Sex and the City leading the way in glamorizing cocktail consumption for a generation. But when you are a youngster constrained by licensing laws, it is all fairly irrelevant anyway: you can only dream of having wry discussions about men’s sexual prowess over several cosmopolitans in some iconic Manhattan nightspot. Along with millions of others before you under strict conditions of prohibition, the best you can do is gulp it down unadorned in a bedroom or at some wintry bus stop, discreetly and fast, and wait for those exciting sensations of warmth to start radiating outward from your core.

Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male. Impersonal accounts of possible causes — rising anxiety, say, or the influence of social media — miss out this crucial part of the explanation. And I’m not sure we should expect or even want anything different. William James wrote of alcohol’s power to “stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”, arguing that while “sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no, drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”. And who should be saying yes to life more than mystically minded, big-hearted, uproarious teenagers? There is nothing more developmentally appropriate. In a society where so many of them seem isolated in dark rooms, either metaphorically or literally, the odd outbreak of intensely sociable drunkenness seems like a small worry to have overall.

Inebriation makes you vulnerable in other ways, though — and perhaps especially so in the case of girls. The disinhibition it brings, and the subjective dislocation from time and space, spell trouble in the wrong company. Alongside the report about teenage drinking, this week there has also been a lot of discussion of Pakistani grooming gangs on X; and the two make for uncomfortable juxtaposition. Extracts circulated from court transcripts underline that alcohol and drugs were the main means used by child rapists to subdue their underage working-class victims. And yet social workers and police repeatedly read the drunkenness of these young girls as a sign of maturity, in a way which somehow made the girls more culpable than the psychopathic men abusing them.

One social worker accused the terrified mother of an exploited 14-year-old engaged in “repeated incidents of severe intoxication” of not being able to accept that her daughter was “growing up”. A 12-year-old was arrested for being “drunk and disorderly” in a derelict house while the accompanying adult males were left unadmonished. In other words, an adultification bias was thriving; and when it comes to persistent stereotypes of fresh-faced young innocence and the “right” sort of victim, it seems that years of feminism have failed to touch the sides.

So much celebratory alcohol use is transitional, taking us from the end of one thing to the beginning of another thing: from day to evening, for instance, or from working day to weekend. In taking the drink that indicates the changeover, you are not simply marking a shift in attitude as creating one out of nothing, wrestling it into being with your intention that things will be brighter and better now. Much teenage drinking is transitional like this too: by necking the stuff, typically you indicate an intention to leave something childish behind and become your own more adventurous person for a night, whatever that means. Of course that doesn’t mean you succeed, as thousands of undignified exits from teen parties can attest. Still, the pleasure is in the attempt, and it is an agenda apparently ferociously pursued by middle- and upper-class teenagers in particular, with few lasting consequences except for the very unlucky.

One of the many hideous features of the grooming gang scandal was that young girls’ natural and age-appropriate desire for a few cathartic, drink-fueled escapades was used against them so heinously, twice over: first by their abusers, and then by the authorities who failed to recognize what was going on. We need to try harder to see the drunkenness of the teenager for what it nearly always is: something essentially childish and innocent; a kind of riotous, joyful inebriation that cannot be replicated later as a fully fledged adult, no matter how hard you might try. The ideal world is not one where such a thing never occurs, but one where teenagers are never violated or otherwise penalized for now and again succumbing. Thanks to malevolent actors, we don’t live in that ideal world and never will; but along with my teenage liver, I mourn it.

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Yet dig a little deeper and things become a tad more nuanced. For all the caustic characterisations thrown the rioters’ way, their motives were far more complex and varied.

Thus far, police have made more than 1,000 arrests connected to the riots. More than 40 people have already been sentenced and that number is likely to rise markedly in the coming weeks. Already, however, what is striking about this group is their heterogeneity. Among the not so usual suspects: a 43-year-old woman who pushed a wheelie bin at police; a 34-year-old homeless mother-of-five who contrived to do the same, but instead ended up face-planting at the feet of her intended target; a 25-year-old homeless man; an 18-year-old with ADHD, a 15-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy; a bingo-playing gay couple; and a 69-year-old retired welder.

The nature and seriousness of the violence of the rioters seems to vary greatly too, ranging from vandalism on cars to punching a police officer in the face. While the worst of the violence was very grave indeed — a library was torched and sacked in Liverpool, and there were attempts to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers — some was more ridiculous than properly lethal: one teenager, aged 19, lobbed an egg at the police while chanting in support of Tommy Robinson.

Yet while there doesn’t seem to be a single profile of a rioter, three profiles have emerged — profiles that, ultimately, we need to distinguish if we’re to understand why these riots took place. Based on trial information and extensive online footage of the riots, they are: Combatants, Geezers and Scallies, and Losers.

The first group — Combatants — refers to the kind of rioter that many have in mind when invoking the image of the far-Right thug: namely, inveterate racists alongside self-proclaimed patriots motivated by fears about white replacement and hostility to the British state and police for their perceived collusion in this. Combatants are almost exclusively men who see themselves as defenders not only of English culture, but as the protectors of English women and girls — from, in their eyes, the rapacious sexual desires of non-white, and especially Muslim, immigrant men.

Despite this relatively strict categorisation, what remains unclear is how many Combatants were involved in the riots, how much of the violence they were responsible for, and whether that violence had been planned in advance. Nor do we know whether they were members or affiliates of organised far-Right groups or looser networks of ex-EDL activists and hooligans, like 28-year-old Liam Ryan who assaulted a black man during unrest in Manchester city centre and was already subject to a football banning order.

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The second group — Geezers and Scallies — refers to older and younger men respectively with criminal backgrounds whose participation in the riots was motivated not by any considered ideological grievances, but an abiding interest in manufacturing mayhem and the drama of violent contention. Historically, riots have always attracted this kind of dissolute stress-seeker, because they present ripe opportunities for a tremendous tear-up, including hand-to-hand combat with reviled authorities and the ritualised looting of goods that are later invariably discarded or destroyed.

Unlike the violence of Combatants, there is no instrumental logic to the violence of Geezers and Scallies: it is done and enjoyed for its own sake, because it’s thrilling and existentially satisfying. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the violence is senseless; indeed, during much of the past fortnight’s disorder, it’s hard to miss the blatant defiance, spite and mockery on show towards the police. One rioter, for example, prior to having a brick thrown at his groin, danced effeminately in front of riot police, an act of mockery that was captured in camera-phone footage that swiftly went viral.

The final group — Losers — refers to that type of rioter, both male and female, whose participation in the riots was spontaneous and situational. Many of these accidental rioters were drunk when they entered the fray, either because they’re alcoholics or had been out on a bender or both; one 30-year-old rioter who hurled metal sheeting at police in Hartlepool had reportedly drank 30 cans of larger and had no memory of his involvement in the disorder. For some, it was the first time they had been in serious trouble with the police before, unlike the other two categories of rioters, many of whom have extensive rap-sheets.

It isn’t fully clear why the roughly dozen Losers sentenced so far participated in the violence, and none can coherently explain it, other than that something in the spectacle of violence beckoned them to enter it and join in the communal revelry of semi-authorised transgression. This is something most now deeply regret and not a few have sought to distance themselves from the ideological convictions of the Combatants they were rioting alongside. For example, Kieron Gatenby, whose sentence of 16 months in prison for lobbing an egg at police in Hartlepool seems especially harsh, did not harbour any racist views, according to a probation report. “He says he is disgusted at being involved with people who were chanting racist slurs,” Gatenby’s solicitor told Teesside Crown Court at his sentencing hearing. Similarly, it transpired at the hearing of Stacey Vint that her involvement in the riots in Middlesbrough was animated more by alcohol than ideology.

Of course, the overall picture may yet change. But it does seem to suggest that the narrative that the riots were wholly the handiwork of far-Right thugs is oversimplistic. Many of the rioters didn’t see themselves as part of some political resistance; they were bored and some were angry.

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The other salutary effect of looking at the profiles of the rioters is that it humanises them: in those pallid and lived-in faces in the police mugshots, we see a cross section of English working-class people from mostly northern towns. We read reports of teenage boys and girls who were involved in the disturbances and perhaps wonder about their turbulent lives and “lived experience” of white privilege. We read about someone like Stacey Vint, who is homeless because she fled an abusive relationship, and perhaps feel a stab of sympathy for her — or at least some sense of injustice that she was given such a punitive sentence (20 months in prison).

By contrast, you don’t find much humane empathy towards the rioters on social media or in the liberal press, but instead contempt and loathing. This expresses itself in different ways, one of which is a blatantly classist revulsion that sees the rioters as an odious and atavistic skidmark on multicultural society. The other is a kind of elite disdain that hides its moral revulsion under the cover of alarmist concern over the “radicalisation” of white working-class people; here, ordinary aspects of white working-class culture such as piss-taking are interpreted as signs of extremism in precisely the same way that ordinary aspects of conservative Islam were once red-flagged by Right-leaning terrorism experts like Sebastian Gorka.

None of this is to say that we should be sentimental or lenient towards the rioters. But it is imperative that we avoid painting them all with the same brush — and that means doing the more painstaking work of looking closely at their profiles and motives. Those who do otherwise — whether they are the Prime Minister, a think-tanker or a grifter angling for the Government’s attention — can call the rioters far-Right thugs or even terrorists if they like. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they’re doing anything other than playing the grubby game of politics, much less providing any understanding of why the riots unfolded, and how they could unfold again.

While the combination of drugs and sex is nothing new, chemsex as an underground cultural phenomenon became popularised in conjunction with the mainstreaming of online dating apps and HIV antiretroviral drugs in the late Eighties and Nineties. “Stigma towards methamphetamine from those who did not use it kept us united as a group… we called ourselves ‘chemsex club’,” wrote David Stuart, an HIV activist who claims to be one of the first to use the word. “We were united less by commonalities or friendship, but more so by our shared preference for chems.”

Most of the current discourse around chemsex comes from the public-health sector, which tends to frame it in a paradigm of risk and harm reduction. But a field of academic study sometimes called critical chemsex studies has recently emerged that aims to centre the practice instead within the realms of pleasure, intimacy and identity. One seminal text in this growing field is Pleasure Consuming Drugs by the writer Kane Race, which tackles the question of how drugs have come to mediate sex in the gay discourse.

In the book’s final chapter, “Exceptional Sex”, Race opens with a personal experience: one night in Sydney, he was approached in a video lounge by a guy who was rolling hard on ecstasy. The swooning stranger was too impaired to carry through the sexual encounter, and eventually staggered out of the place as they parted ways. Kane remained haunted by the encounter, returning to it over the years as he attempted to untangle the ethico-political tensions between autonomy and care. “What is my duty to this stranger? How do I enact it?” Kane writes. “Why does this guy put himself in this situation? Why does he feel he has to knock himself out to be here?”

Last autumn, I co-moderated a discussion in New York City on chemsex where we attempted to answer these very questions. Titled “Appetite, Euphoria, and the Inevitability of Coming Down,” the event was hosted by The Infernal Grove, a study group that meets once a month to pursue “an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction, and recovery (not necessarily in that order)”. In addition to Infernal Grove founders Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, both professors at Syracuse University, my co-moderators included experimental filmmaker Devon Narine-Singh and multimedia artist Mikiki, whose chemsex-inspired video work was showing at the Whitney Museum that week in honour of World Aids Day.

That evening, about two dozen artists, filmmakers, writers, and other creative-types showed up to a darkened dance studio near Herald Square that doubled as our meeting room. Many more attended virtually through Zoom. A tall man with a blonde ponytail hopped on the piano in the corner, improvising a haunting welcome tune as we took our seats in a circle, smiling shyly as we introduced ourselves by way of unpacking our relationships to drugs. What was remarkable was the diversity of not just age, gender, and racial identities in the room, but the breadth of psychoactive experiences across the sober-using spectrum — from former heroin junkies to professionals who’ve never touched a drug, devout AA members to party-loving recreational ravers, underground psychedelic healers to sober-curious skaters.

This colourful cast of characters reminded me of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I’ve attended in the past, where folks from all walks of life form unlikely alliances in pursuit of communal healing. In fact, Alcoholics Anonymous seems to be going through a contemporary rebrand; what David Foster Wallace described in Infinite Jest as a “goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” is turning into a veritable hot scene. More sober-curious young people are showing up to meetings who aren’t hardcore alcoholics per se, perhaps sensing that AA can provide something increasingly rare these days: a sense of community, which is to say support without the strings of self-interest.

Yet, AA’s dogma of total drug abstinence does not appeal to everybody, and many are hungry for alternatives. New groups such as The Infernal Grove now cater to those seeking more sustainable relationships to substance use beyond the established orthodoxy of traditional sobriety paradigms. Despite the necessity of these alternative paths, I had been afraid that the chemsex discussion would be seen as problematic or triggering. Conversations about drugs usually play out as a moral drama of extremes: the anti-drug abstinence of AA vs the drug-positive enthusiasm of recreational settings. It is still so rare to enter a thought space where sobriety is discussed as more of a spectrum, where the ambiguous zones of druggie disinhibition can be untangled by people from all over the drug-sober continuum. It felt like the future.

“Honestly? This conversation is extremely triggering to me, but I’m also very excited to be here,” confessed someone who was in AA. Another person explained she had never touched a drug in her life, but was here because of an addict family member. The conversation turned to how recreational sex and drugs are not beyond the realm of care and attention; how even though drug practices often take place in a sub-intentional zone — “zoning out, getting distracted, losing yourself to something, cutting loose, getting carried away,” as Kane put it — they should not be exempt from insight and consideration.  Whenever we began to romanticise drugs too much, extolling the ways they can be used as quick escape routes from normative or oppressive societal demands, the sober people would chime in. “Sure, there is an element of surprise in drug use, but also, there isn’t,” one said quietly. “Maybe you imagine breaking through a barrier, but then you wake up hungover and nothing has changed.”

The conversation that night brought to light intersectional commonalities in the reasons why people of all stripes engage with chemsex — most commonly, it seems, to dissolve the culturally-conditioned sexual anxieties that can be so tricky to shake off while sober. Gay men and straight women alike spoke of letting go of body dysmorphia and shame while in the disinhibited state of chemically-enhanced euphoria, of exploring desires that the cultures of toxic masculinity and transmisogyny have impinged their abilities to see. “It is possible to look at the shadow without the shadow taking over,” said Mikiki, speaking on how the history that people carry often shapes their sexual inclinations. “Of course my desires are related to my trauma, but am I not allowed to explore that?”

Untangling the ways drugs can modulate pleasure, dampen the voices of our inner critics, and foster a kind of dark intimacy is still such a sensitive topic — and the movement to destigmatise chemsex is, in many ways, still in its infancy. As a woman, I am also not the traditional demographic that is typically “allowed” to even discuss this concept, let alone in these expansive terms. In fact, Stuart has accused folks who use this term but do not identify as gay men of cultural appropriation.

But like a growing number of academics in the field, I believe this framework should include a wider population — because as the discussion in New York suggested, many other social groups already engage in these practices for similar reasons as gay or bisexual men, yet are under-represented in current research. Adopting a broader and more intersectional lens to the study of drug use and sex could allow a deeper understanding of how the dense mesh of governing power structures both shape and curtail our desires. It could also help us to understand how this practice reflects the historical and social contexts from which they emerge — including the pharmaceuticalisation of sexuality, contemporary culture of endless self-enhancement, and crisis of intimacy under neoliberal individualism.

As the conversations around chemsex continue to evolve, perhaps our conceptions will also move beyond the current narrative of retreat and resilience. “I want a different conception of corporeal agency, where drugs don’t feature such an obvious and thrilling escape route,” Race wrote. “What would it take to engage more fully with the texture of these escapes? What possibilities of care, what new pleasures, what ethics, what multiplicities emerge?”

Johnson may not actually have much blue blood in his veins, but he is certainly a toff. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is both the greatest clown in English literature and a knight of the realm. Lord Byron was nobleman, rebel, daredevil, libertine and criminal (he had an incestuous affair with his sister), all of which made him more popular in his day than Billy Connolly is in ours. And though people detest the arrogant kind of patrician, they are ready to give their vote to the kind of high-class eccentric who shambles around with a parrot on his shoulder, even if he lives in Downing Street.

Dukes and Viscounts are powerful in one sense but marginal in another. As marginal figures, they have an affinity with the crook and the nonconformist. The landowner has a soft spot for the poacher, but not much sympathy for the petit-bourgeois gamekeeper. Some aristocrats see life as a game, playing it with one ironic eye on its arbitrary nature. In this, they are like the medieval Fool, who sees that all social roles are reversible, including his own.

The Fool is wiser than the king because he knows he is playing a part, whereas the king takes himself for real. The Fool thus speaks a subversive kind of truth, for which, as in King Lear, he risks being beaten up by his employers. Fools know that they aren’t up to much and so are more canny than their masters, who aren’t up to much but don’t know it. Playing the fool is a matter of playing the fool, making a performance of one’s folly which requires art and intelligence. The wisdom of foolery shows up the foolishness of the wise.

The strength of the clown, then, lies in his weakness. Because he is one of the lowliest forms of social life, he can’t fall any further and thus assumes a strange invulnerability. It is dangerous for ruling classes if the common people have nothing to lose. Fools and clowns are “all-licensed”, as one of Lear’s daughters complains of his jester, but this doesn’t matter much because they have no real power beyond mockery and wordplay. They are free in proportion to their impotence.

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The trouble begins when the jester, like Johnson, is really a king in disguise, falling over his feet as a useful ploy for landing in Downing Street. Shakespeare understands that maintaining a pact with failure and frailty is the only basis for genuine power, which is different from arsing around in order to charm the electorate. The jester plays with the truth in a way which reveals some acute insights, whereas Johnson simply lies through his teeth.

Breaking the rules isn’t always to be censured. Great artists do it all the time. Even if you are a Schoenberg or a Beckett, however, you have to grasp the conventions well enough to sense when you should throw them away. Sometimes it’s the conventions themselves which will tell you this, or allow you to intimate it. You may need a textbook to learn Malay, but you are fluent in the language only when you can put the book aside. You incorporate the rules rather than ignore them, just as you don’t need to make an agonising act of choice every time the little green man, frozen eternally in the act of stepping forward, turns suddenly to red. Doing things without thinking about them is part of social existence. It shouldn’t be confused with not thinking about them because you don’t give a damn.

How do clowns become kings? The clown’s problem is how not to be a cynic. If he pushes his mockery too far he can end up deflating not this or that value, but value as such. All that remains to be believed in is his own ego. Shakespeare’s Iago, who has a touch of the jester about him, is ruthlessly self-interested, just like our dear leader. Like a whimsical monarch, the only reality that exists for the cynic is his own appetites. These can be gratified all the more easily if human life is a game, since if things are insubstantial you can manipulate them better. This applies especially to women. The cynic may not be a rake, but almost all rakes are cynics, convinced that women exist purely for their own pleasure. It isn’t accidental that Boris Johnson is a philanderer.

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By Terry Eagleton

Britain is one of those rare nations in which not being serious is thought to be a virtue. Seriousness is for shopkeepers, not for rogues and roués. The middle classes have character, whereas the upper classes are seen as characters. The Roundhead is grim-lipped and high-minded, while the Cavalier makes light of things in order to show his superiority to them. This is the kind of sangfroid which helped to build the Empire, and in the form of a certain slapdash amateurism helped to lose it as well. Giving the debonair Lord Mountbatten a colony to rule over or a battleship to command was like giving a machine gun to a gorilla. The word ’amateurism’ means doing things because you love to, not because you have to. Check-out assistants have to turn in for work each morning, but gentleman farmers occasionally heave calves into land rovers because they rather fancy the idea of mucking in.

As the oldest capitalist nation in the world, Britain has long been a breeding ground for individualism. Each individual is a quirky deviation from the norm, in which case there isn’t really a norm in at all. Everybody, like Dickens’s grotesque figures, is a law unto themselves, which means that the law doesn’t exist and society is essentially anarchic. The irony is that the very disdain for convention which endeared Boris Johnson to voters who were tired of plastic politicians is what threatens to bring him down.

There are two other social groups which have traditionally played the Fool. The first is the long tradition of Irishmen who were jesters to the English court. One thinks of the 18th century writer Oliver Goldsmith, who hailed from the Irish midlands and seemed to exist in London simply for the amusement of Samuel Johnson and his circle. The Dubliner Edmund Burke, one of the finest orators the House of Commons has ever witnessed, was said by some English MPs to smell of whisky and potatoes. His scorching rhetoric, which once caused some gentlewomen in the public gallery of the Commons to faint away, could easily be dismissed as blather and blarney.

Some decades ago, the resident Irish jester to the English nation was the bibulous playwright Brendan Behan, who graduated from the IRA via Borstal to the London TV studios. He once described himself as a drinker with a writing problem. Television producers would wait until late in the evening, when Behan was bound to be drunk, and then haul him on their show to be interviewed. Not long ago, the Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin inherited this dubious honour, loudly berating all and sundry on late night television. He did so, however, in a thick Belfast accent which signalled that he wasn’t really one of us, and so was not to be taken too seriously. You could savour his idiosyncrasies while overlooking his opinions. As Olivia remarks in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool.

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The other traditional group of clowns is old-style Oxbridge dons. Seriousness for them, too, is a vulgar affair fit mainly for traffic wardens. Only nerds talk shop. A medical colleague of mine who spent much of his time plucking bits of helmet from the brains of dying motorcyclists would saunter into college dinner and recount a few amusing anecdotes about golf. I was also acquainted with one of the world’s experts on black holes, who was as silent on the subject of astronomy as if he was a bouncer in a night club. As a young don still wet behind the ears, I once asked a senior colleague how many children he had.

This was an unforgivable move, since it made it almost impossible for him not to give a factual reply, and facts were for oiks. He did, however, sidle out of it superbly. “Oh, thousands and thousands,” he sighed. This is the background from which Boris Johnson emerged. No wonder he can’t tell the truth.

He eventually became a YouTube Bruh: that genre of male intellectual celebrity, like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, “destroying” idiots in bite-sized video clips. But the appeal of Hitchens, to me at least, wasn’t just polemical; he possessed a suavity that impressed me powerfully. He was just as likely to riff on Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel sequence on twentieth-century British upper-class life as to publicly humiliate a religious crank.

I was 13 when I first discovered him. He had a similar appeal to me as James Bond: the willingness to engage in combat, the charm and sophistication of a worldly bruiser, even the booze. In a 2000 documentary called Hitch Hike, made by Channel 4 and tracking Hitchens’s book tour of his polemic against Bill Clinton, he said, “Jimmy Cameron was the reason I wanted to become a journalist”. He added that Cameron, who was a foreign correspondent, wrote a piece in 1966 outlining all the things he had accomplished as a journalist. Here is Hitchens ventriloquising Cameron: “I’ve sat with Ho Chi Minh, and I was deported from South Africa, and I was there listening to Nehru at midnight when India became a free country. I’ve also swum in all the five oceans and fucked on all five continents”. Hitchens himself made the world of the hack seem glamorous.

Or, perhaps, not the glamour of Bond or a foreign correspondent, but another form: the monied public intellectual. As Ian Parker puts it in his excellent 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens: “Hitchens has the life that a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be: he wakes up when he likes, works from home, is married to someone who wears leopard-skin high heels, and conducts heady, serious discussions late into the night.”

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On the topic of glamour, there was something also Francophile about him, and not just his fondness for exposing part of his chest in interviews and debates. He was an eighteenth-century style iconoclast, a public school Voltaire, who took down sacred cows: Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and God. This tendency toward confrontation was instilled by his education in Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the heretics of Communism. One must never stick rigidly to the party line. Individual responsibility and moral conscience were essential.

Nevertheless, there was also a coarseness beneath his oratorical sheen: when he tried, for instance, to divorce the civil rights movement from its religious influence, emphasising the secularism of A. Philip Randolph over the religious fervour of Martin Luther King. This was sophistry. Arguing, as he also did, that religion poisons everything, was intellectually juvenile and inconsistent with his deep appreciation of John Donne.

When he said, moreover, “there is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ”, this was a brilliant epigram. H.L. Mencken would be proud of its rhetorical force, but it’s also nonsense: IQ is one of the most stable findings in psychology and social science.

Related to this coarseness was his deep appreciation for vulgarity and obscenity. Substantial passages of his memoir Hitch-22 are dedicated to explaining the games he used to play with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Clive James and others: the boomer version of Dr Johnson’s Club. He called the gathering “the Bloomsbury kebab joint”. One of their games consisted of substituting the word “heart” for “dick” in well-known titles, or the word “love” for “fuck”, or “love” for “hysterical sex”. So they got, among many other confected titles, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Man Who Fucked Women”, and “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate”.

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He once said to an audience who were distracted by a heckler, “leave him alone … I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire”. On the question of Mother Teresa’s virginity, he wrote: “Who can say what happened with the dashing boulevardiers of Skopje when Agnes Bojaxhiu was but a pouting and trusting lass? (The whole problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position.)”.

This bawdiness was at times entertaining and at times embarrassing. But what we value in intellectuals is not often the particular arguments they make but their personality. As Edward Said wrote, in an essay about public intellectuals, “when I read Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertrand Russell it is their specific, individual voice and presence that makes an impression on me over and above their arguments because they are speaking out for their beliefs. They cannot be mistaken for an anonymous functionary or careful bureaucrat”.

The voice of Hitchens worked less well in print. As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”. Martin’s father Kingsley was more brutal: he described Hitchens as “the one who can talk but can’t write”. This was in the Seventies, during Hitchens’s New Statesman days, when his prose was more functional and didactic. According to Amis fils, however, Hitchens’s writing improved after 1989. But there were still some odd tics in his style after this, such as his tendency towards using brackets for a needless digression on some point, and puncturing that digression with a showy italicised word or phrase. I can endlessly listen to him speak in interviews and discussion panels; but reading him can be a bumpy experience.

When Amis said Hitchens thought like a child, he was getting at something. Although Hitchens’s moral convictions seemed admirably clear, they also strayed into simple-mindedness: some of his criticism of the “anti-imperialist” Left and religious extremism is still valuable, but his zealous support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks even more disastrous now.

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Although Hitchens spent much of his career going after sacred cows, many of his fans now treat him in a hagiographical fashion. After the Spectator journalist Angus Colwell wrote a piece criticising Hitchens’s gung-ho support for the war in Afghanistan in August, many people described Colwell as possessing “sour grapes” and argued that Hitchens was “living rent-free” in his mind. These responses speak to the cultishness that surrounds some of Hitchens’s fan base; it is like someone is attacking their dad.

But if there is one thing worth taking from the writings and life of Christopher Hitchens, it is the importance of thinking critically and independently. Turning a blind eye to his faults out of a sense of sentimental loyalty seems profoundly un-Hitchian. It’s a shame that many of his supporters do this. But then again, as the title to Julien Benda’s book about intellectuals suggests, La Trahison des Clercs, public intellectuals are often like clerics. We should be able to admire Hitchens’s voice without taking it as holy writ.

It’s not that these scares were completely unfounded. People have been convicted for deliberately infecting others with HIV, albeit through sex, not needles. And in 1989, a group of teenage girls were arrested for jabbing women with pins in New York “for fun”. But if there was ever a case of someone infected with HIV by a deliberate needle attack, I can’t find any record of it. The panic was essentially an urban legend, like razor blades hidden in Halloween sweets.

Now, students are reporting being jabbed with needles in nightclubs, not to spread HIV but to drug them. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has called for the police to look into it. It’s part of a wider concern about drink spiking, which recently inspired a national boycott of nightclubs, “Girls Night In”. But how worried should we be?

First, let’s talk about needle druggings. There are stories. In the US, for instance, eight people died at a festival, apparently crushed during a crowd surge. There were unrelated reports of a security guard and others being jabbed with a needle. But none of them have been confirmed.

And jabbing someone with a needle is not easy. One academic I spoke to said that “incapacitating someone with a needle is something the NKVD [the Russian secret police] would have to do”. It hurts, for a start; and getting it into the bloodstream via the leg or back is “really inefficient”. The dosing would be amazingly hard to get right, as would doing it without someone noticing for the several seconds it takes to press the plunger on the syringe. The idea that it’s widespread is incredibly unlikely.

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But there are claims, meanwhile, of an “epidemic” of drink spiking. There’s certainly been an increase in the number of cases reported — Harry Sumnall, a professor of substance use at Liverpool John Moores University, says that the number of police-reported incidents has gone up from about 150 in 2006 to 500-600 a year more recently. Of course, that’s not the same as the actual act becoming more common.

Academics and experts I have spoken to are all careful to say that it is important to listen when people say they’ve been drugged. But it’s also important to remember that people’s subjective experiences are not always reliable. As Paul North, a former drug treatment worker and the director of non-profit advocacy organisation Volteface, told me, there are a huge number of anecdotal reports. But it’s really hard to get any data.

So, you can record the number of people who think they’ve been spiked — about 5% of victims of rape and sexual assault think they were drugged, as Sumnall points out. But we know from every other area of psychological science that self-reported data is really unreliable. Ivan Ezquerra-Romano, co-founder and director of the social enterprise Drugs And Me, is also doing a PhD in cognitive psychology, and he says “self-report is something that we as psychologists try to run away from”.

There are a few studies that take toxicology samples from people who come to A&E reporting that they have been spiked, but not very many. Those that do exist tend to find little evidence of drugging. This one from 2007, for instance, sampled the blood and/or urine of 75 suspected spiking cases. They found unexplained drugs (that is, drugs the patient denied taking) in eight of the samples; three of them were cannabis and three were MDMA. GHB and benzodiazepines were each found in one. The report concluded that the use of sedatives to spike drinks “​​may not be as common as reported in the mainstream media”.

A more recent review of the literature, which looks at a variety of studies from around the world, found similar results. It concluded that drink-spiking “appears to be an un-common occurrence in drug facilitated sexual assault”. “In the majority of cases that get investigated, the substances are impossible to detect,” says Giulia Zampini, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Greenwich.

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There are possible explanations for this, of course. One is that GHB, in particular, is very quickly metabolised, especially if authorities are slow to take samples; so perhaps there’s under-reporting of spiking incidents. But equally, as an academic I spoke to pointed out, sometimes it’s easier to say – to the police, or one’s parents or employers – that you were drugged than that you took drugs recreationally.

This doesn’t mean that “drug-facilitated sexual assault” isn’t a real and widespread problem. It’s just that on the whole, the people — the, let’s face it, men — who are doing it don’t need to use fancy drugs, and don’t need to slip it into a stranger’s drink in a nightclub. The focus on one particular archetype of “spiking” — the stranger slipping a clear liquid into a woman’s drink in a club, as in the BBC drama I May Destroy You — distracts from a more complex social problem.

“The stranger-danger archetype is very rare,” says Zampini. “In every aspect of rape and sexual assault, it is much more common in an environment where there’s a relationship of some kind.”

And in most cases of drug-facilitated sexual assault, the drug is alcohol. Sometimes it’s the perpetrator buying stronger drinks than the victim expected — a double instead of a single, say. Sometimes it’s that the victim voluntarily drinks more than they are able to handle, and the perpetrator then takes advantage. “There’s a lack of recognition of how vulnerable alcohol can make you, if consumed in large quantities,” says Zampini. “And there is a dangerous binge drinking culture in universities — drinking is down compared to past generations, but still prevalent. And people can confuse the effects of alcohol with other drugs.”

But as North and Zampini say, the important thing is the intent to harm, not the particular drug used to do it. If a man buys a woman drinks with the intent of getting her too drunk to consent, or takes advantage of a woman who is already too drunk to consent, that’s just as bad as slipping illicit drugs into her drinks.

The concern is that, in a rush to be seen to be doing something, authorities and nightclubs might start cracking down on drugs — more CCTV, more searches at the door. “These tougher responses don’t work,” Zampini says. “If people want to sneak drugs into clubs they’ll do so.” What should be happening — and pleasingly is happening — is a focus on protecting people rather than cracking down on drugs. “There have been some recent good steps that have been taken in providing harm reduction,” says Zampini: things like identifying harassers on the dance floor, and throwing them out, rather than throwing out people for “taking half a pill”.

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Even if drugs were eliminated, as long as there’s a binge-drinking culture in UK universities, drug-facilitated sexual assault will remain a risk. Spiking probably isn’t a major driver of it — although Ezquerra —Romano notes that on the gay scene, where GHB and GBL are used recreationally for chemsex, it’s more likely, because the drugs are widely available. But in the university-nightclub scenario that most of the recent media attention has been on, alcohol is probably the main cause.

We can’t blame victims, but we shouldn’t be reluctant to suggest measures to protect themselves. “There’s nothing wrong with encouraging people to take steps to ensure their own safety,” Zampini says. “But the onus of responsibility shouldn’t be on women. Otherwise it’s like the old idea of women dressing provocatively and asking for it.” So the authorities need to facilitate those steps. For instance: if we’re going to say to women that they should cover their drinks, then clubs should provide lids.

And it’s worth getting better data on drink spiking, in case it’s more common than we think. That’s something Ezquerra-Romano is working on: for instance, he suggests drug vapes that record the amount you’ve taken via a smartphone app, so that if you do a blood test later you can compare the expected blood concentration for the amount you’ve taken with what is actually found. (Existing “colour dye” tests for spiking drugs are “worse than useless,” in Sumnall’s experience.)

But it’s more likely that drink spiking is rare, focused on by the media because the narrative is simple: the innocent victim and the calculating, predatory stranger. I worry (and everybody I spoke to for this piece agreed) that focusing on these sympathetic but unrepresentative cases is a bad idea. A woman who gets drunk voluntarily is just as much a victim, if a man takes advantage of her, as is someone who is drugged. It’s not that drink-spiking victims are the “real”, or the virtuous, ones.

The Nineties-era HIV scare died away. But fascinatingly, the recent surge in “jabbing” scare stories has revived it: false stories of young women infected by HIV in UK cities have been circulating alongside the drug-scare ones. Those stories we know are untrue; I suspect that drink-spiking is real, but rare. But it’s definitely true that men take advantage of drunk women. That’s just as bad, and far more common. Creating extra reasons for women to feel afraid does not seem wise.

I was born the year Thatcher came to power, and came of age just as the rave scene began to be pried loose from illegal parties in fields and sweaty, underground warehouses. By the time I turned 18, the countercultural hedonism of rave culture was a regulated multi-million-pound industry. Even so, clubbing felt subversive: a form of self-expression where social norms could be dissolved in a bath of pure hedonism, shorn of stuffy rules and social norms.

Hearing the bass get louder as you approached the entrance, and the way the air became a warm, rich fug of dry ice, hormones and ear-bursting noise. The spark of sexual tension, the illicit substances, the sheer extravagance all felt thrilling.

But with the cynicism of my now-wizened age, I’ve come to believe that nightclubs have replaced their subversiveness with a sort of cuddly fascism. I’m not talking jackboots-and-flags fash, of course; but instead about how the absolute hedonism and self-expression of a nightclub needs a single point of authoritarian control — the DJ. Usually enthroned in an elevated position that resembles a dais or altar, everyone surrenders to this monarch of the decks, while order is kept at the margins by his unaccountable enforcers: the bouncers.

It’s a note-perfect representation, in other words, for the way an individualistic society seems to combine the pursuit of freedom with a drift toward authoritarian governance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies suggest the generation that came of age after me — just as clubbing went mainstream — is the most authoritarian generation alive in Britain today. One 2019 report showed 35% of under-35s supported having the army run the country, compared to just 15% of over-65s. And just 75% thought democracy was a good way to run a nation, down from 93% of over-65s.

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But if the hedonistic autocracy of a nightclub is the perfect metaphor for an emerging millennial authoritarianism, so too is the crowd: a mass of people united in the shared thrill of the music, yet also atomised, every dance unique. And indeed, a study released last week by the think tank Onward reported the most authoritarian generation is also the loneliest.

According to the study, 22% of under-35s say they have one or no close friends. This proportion has trebled over the last decade, while the proportion with four or more close friends fell from 60% to 40% over the same period.

I’m not suggesting that growing up clubbing somehow caused a generation to become lonely or authoritarian. But we’re all, to a great extent, what our parents made us; and the millennials, children of the boomers, were raised to express themselves. We can hardly blame them for doing so — or for accepting the trade-offs. And even if self-expression inadvertently makes us lonely, there’s always Big Tech to help. This industry is now rushing to fill the gap, with apps to help you find friends as well as a partner.

Will this work? Loyalty and affinity have their own arithmetic, and it’s not very amenable to individual control — or computer algorithms. I’ve drifted through numerous social scenes, careers and geographies over the last two decades; people who’ve become and stayed friends over that time are often not those I might have clicked as a “match” on some website.

Besides, contrary to the stereotype that sees younger people as so self-absorbed they don’t want friends they can’t choose, Onward’s report questions the idea that young people are selfish. For example, under-35s were twice as likely as older generations to look in on vulnerable or elderly neighbours on a regular basis during the pandemic.

Nor is it purely a matter of spending too much time on social media. While another easy “young people nowadays” stereotype paints them all as too Very Online to socialise in the real world, it seems that only 25-34s now conduct their social lives mainly online. For this group, 42% agree that “I have more friends online than I do in real life”, while only 25% disagree.

This lonely, very online demographic, though, has been heavily represented in political unrest over the pandemic. Indeed, as lockdown after lockdown has rolled out, I’ve come to suspect a link between those shuttered nightclubs and flourishing mass demonstrations.

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I’ve argued elsewhere that pandemic-era protest is less directly about politics than self-expression: a rave-like experience, ordered by a generalised, emotive cause without clear links to any specific policy outcome. The expressive quality of this phenomenon was richly illustrated by the protest against lockdown that took place to mark the end of restrictions. It remains to be seen whether this energy that migrated from clubland to street politics will go quietly back to its box now that dancing is permitted again.

I dare say those millennials who’ve done well over the last two decades will be happy to see that happen. The older edge of this generation is reaching positions of political influence now, and will likely be happy to help roll out legal, cultural and financial infrastructure for the authoritarian hedonism they themselves have largely evaded. Who cares about a little more state control, if that’s the price of expressing yourself with an evening dancing? No wonder the kids are being offered a return to unrestricted clubland partying — but only in exchange for willingness to be vaccinated, and perhaps to show a vaccine passport.

And perhaps for some this will be enough. When the BBC filmed elated clubbers at Fibre in Leeds on Monday, the watchwords were “friends” and “freedom”: that paradoxical cocktail of individualism, mass participation and hedonism that only a nightclub delivers. “We’ve been blamed for the spread of the Covid”, said one twentysomething woman, “and it’s just nice to get freedom”. But others may find the buzz wears off.

For Covid abruptly switched off most of the compensations offered to those millennials who didn’t do so well in an increasingly brutal economic race, that’s engulfed everyone my age and younger — and whose sharp strictures are helping to drive an epidemic of loneliness. Its contours are well-documented. Home ownership was 53% in the early 1980s, for example, in outer London — but by 2018 it was just 16%. A twentysomething working full-time on minimum wage would have to pay at least 71% of their wages even to rent a one-bedroom flat anywhere in the UK.

It’s hard to picture settling down in those conditions; and indeed, the age of first marriage has been rising steadily for years. Onward’s study suggests many feel too overworked and precarious even to build neighbourly relations or local friendships. This generation, then, may not just be lonely and liquid by choice but also by circumstance.

Against that backdrop, perhaps the appeal of individualistic hedonism isn’t so startling after all. Clubland offers a dream of freedom and self-expression, albeit with little of enduring value to go home to in the morning. But if your home is a shoebox owned by a private equity firm, why would you not want to have a good time?

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If this seems bleak, there is some hope that Gen-Z will turn the tide. For this generation, Onward suggest, rejects the internet’s offer of a lonely existence: under-24s are more likely to disagree than to agree with the statement “socialising online is better than socialising in-person”. And in keeping with this turn away from hyper-mediated mass loneliness, there’s evidence that Gen-Z is also backing away from the kind of mass hedonism of clubland; Gen-Z drinks less, has less sex and is more interested in getting good grades and time with family and close friends than getting blitzed and dancing till 4am.

The more prescient members of Gen-Z, then, seem already to have grasped that the clubland no longer offers a promising social metaphor. They’re adjusting their party (and life) plans for a different mode. The question ahead of us is what becomes of the millennials now sliding, in my footsteps, into middle age.

Banks and private equity firms are snapping up rental housing, and investing in build-to-rent new construction. This spate of investment implies a financial sector confident in having a captive market for private rental housing for a long time. The Dalston warehouses where I queued on Friday nights in the noughties have long since been converted to luxury apartments for the millennials who did well over the last two decades: the coming generation with cultural influence, OBEs and budgets.

And because freedom has been good to them, we can expect them to go on pushing the authoritarian-tinged policies of hedonism and atomisation that delivered freedom (and fond memories of clubbing) with few obvious downsides, until they were ready to buy a house and have kids. But for the also-rans, the ones now missing the boat for starting families, the eternal renters, the chronic gig-workers with seemingly insuperable student debt, the “freedom” to get mashed for an evening may not feel like compensation for long.

In clubland, if you lose track of your friends and dance to the bitter end, you’ll see the lights come on to reveal a dance floor in its true colours: shabby, lonely, devoid of fun. More importantly, partying may not pacify Britain’s lonely and increasingly pessimistic young people forever — with or without a vaccine passport. In such a scenario, expect a bitter political comedown.

According to his friend, film producer Damon Bryant, one of the first on the scene, the flat was pristine: “He put flowers in every vase. He was as sober as a judge. There were no drugs. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

His funeral about a month later was spectacular, even by Soho’s flamboyant standards. A horse-drawn cortege inched its way around the tight grid of streets. Thousands of mourners followed; among them Sienna Miller, Sadie Frost, Alfie Allen, Noel Fielding, Robert Elms and Jaime Winstone. All of them knew the little man who was lying there, silent, and alone.

Bernie Katz was the man they called the Prince of Soho. For 27 years, he had worked as front-of-house manager of the Groucho Club, the long-established and exclusive private members’ club in Soho where, in the 90s, Princess Diana went to lunch and Bill Clinton once played saxophone: a dizzily decadent playground for the rich, the famous and the not-so-famous.

The term “Prince of Soho” was marked out in flowers on the horse-drawn hearse; his title was coined by the actor and writer Stephen Fry, who was closer to Bernie than most.

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Bernie’s funeral made the BBC News at 6pm; he would have been thrilled, everyone said. As TV and radio presenter Robert Elms put it: “He was the essence of this place. He was preposterous, he was gorgeous, he was five foot nothing and had a heart bigger than this square… Bernie knew everybody. If you were touched by Bernie — and it probably meant he touched your bottom — you stayed touched.” Noel Fielding described him as “always in a leopard-skin jacket, whirling around like a windmill. He was a character. I don’t think those people exist anymore.”

Yes, he was a character — but what kind of character? As a member of the Groucho, I knew him a bit, but not well. One person told me that Bernie was the sort of person who was your friend for 60 seconds — and would then disappear. The circumstances of his death — and the strange events that led to his demise, from the moment he left the Groucho in unexplained circumstances a few months before — are explored in my podcast series, Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho?.

Bernie’s death was a shock to many. But it was also a motif — an acknowledgment of another death; that of old Soho itself.

Nowadays, Soho’s spirit has been sold to the highest bidder; the developers have got their way. Independent restaurants are few and far between — on Broadwick Street, there is now a branch of the Ivy, unthinkable 20 years ago. Berwick Street market, for years an impeccable source of all manner of questionable items has been gentrified. The fruit vendors have made way for stalls selling flat whites and falafels.

These streets were once Bernie’s manor: he had worked in the West End pretty much from the moment he left school. Born in 1967 to a Jewish family in south London, as a teenager he witnessed the murder of his father, a gangster called Brian “Little Legs” Clifford. Bernie would later write of his “gangster father” whose life ended with a bullet in the head: “So used was I to a life of drive-by shootings, I thought nothing of the sound of that gunshot, except that it intruded upon my viewing of the Price Is Right.”

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That murder has never been solved. And neither was Bernie’s own demise. Indeed, the latter, as I discovered, was never properly investigated.

Bernie had joined the Groucho as barman in 1990, just before Cool Britannia when the club was at its drug-fuelled zenith: even though the management had — and still has — a strict zero-tolerance policy of drugs.

The Groucho is the kind of place that is guaranteed to divide opinion; there are those, like me, who are long-standing members, and won’t have a word said against it. Others are less enamoured, dismissing it as pretentious and elitist. (To which members reply: isn’t that the point of a club?)

Founded in 1985, the Groucho began as a club for the media and publishing worlds. By the 90s, it had become an infamous celebrity haunt. Inevitably, some members did drugs; the upstairs snooker room was occasionally known as the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. In 1996, the room was the scene of a furious showdown between actress Patsy Kensit and her then-boyfriend, Liam Gallagher. Glasses and snooker balls were thrown, and Gallagher ended up trashing not just the table but the room itself.

Other moments, too, became Groucho legend: Melvyn Bragg chatting to U2; Friends star Matt LeBlanc propping up the bar alone one Saturday night; Dancer Wayne Sleep once took Princess Diana there for lunch — and handed her the bill. On one memorable night in 1995, Damien Hirst put his £20,000 Turner Prize money behind the downstairs bar.

And throughout it all, Bernie was there. He would sashay from table to table, clad in leopard skin and Cuban heels, soothing the pampered members, dealing with their tantrums, dropping in a witty or caustic remark. The Bernie stories, like the man himself, were outrageous, lurid and always true. He proved his chutzpah by once ejecting Madonna for being rude.

Stephen Fry, a founder member of the Groucho, was closer to Bernie than most. “My first impressions were of a huge, vibrant and outgoing personality,” he told me. “All hugs, grins, extravagant language and wild attire.” But, he went on: “There probably was something sad about Bernie …  It may seem glamorous… but in fact there was a lot of work, very little money and too many temptations into addiction and late nights.”

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I talked to dozens of Bernie’s friends, family members and Groucho regulars: all spoke warmly of him, though some were curiously reluctant to go into detail about the last weeks of his life. Others were deeply puzzled. Actress Alison Steadman told me: “Bernie was fun and kind. When he walked in, the room lit up. I have never been able to establish exactly what happened and why… but whatever it was, it was so wrong.”

So what did happen to Bernie? Bernie’s tragedy, his surviving family and friends told me, was that after he left the Groucho, with no regular job, he had begun to succumb to the addictions that had dogged him through his life.

The precise reasons for his departure were never properly explained, though many believe his self-indulgent figure ran counter to Soho’s sanitised new world. Whatever the truth, without that job he lost his own sense of worth. He soon found himself short of money, and ended up taking small loans from friends.

And then, his close friends told me, things quickly escalated. Put bluntly, he got on the wrong side of the wrong type of people — specifically, it was whispered, Albanian gangsters and their constant demands for repayment over drug debts. As one friend said: “He had a lot of debt, and that debt was related to buying cocaine, which there were rumours it was an Eastern European gang. That was being spoken about a lot… thirty grand to the Albanians, or whatever it was.”

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The drug trade in Soho, for most of Bernie’s life, was dominated by Italians and Maltese gangsters. But sometime in the last decade, the Albanians squeezed them out. They were frighteningly ruthless, violent and brooked no dissent. Bernard Clifford Katz — camp, easy-going and sweet-natured — would not have stood a chance.

Certainly by the time of his death, the Albanians had cemented their control in London. Even now, four years after Bernie’s death, they are still at the forefront of the cocaine trade in this country which is worth billions.

Perhaps if the Albanians had stayed out of Soho, just at the time Bernie was working there, he might never have fallen out with gangsters. If he hadn’t been such a gregarious soul, he might have kept his job. And if he’d have kept his nose clean — in every sense of the phrase — he might still be welcoming guests into reception and charging across the room in his Cuban heels.

But that wasn’t to be. For Bernie, Soho was a timeless neighbourhood of decadence and debauchery. Until it wasn’t.

After his death, the Groucho renamed its downstairs restaurant “Bernie’s” in his honour. On one wall sits a beautiful portrait of him; he looks strangely relaxed and at peace — a memory to a golden era of Soho that has since decayed.

Bernie: Who Killed the Prince of Soho is available at now.

Similarly, when we think of historical opposition to the public consumption of alcohol, temperance and prohibition inevitably come to mind — the very opposite of happiness. The people behind these movements, we assume, were rural, reactionary busybodies who hated fun. They were also probably racist. And they definitely had no sense of humour. They were people you wouldn’t want to have a drink with because they wouldn’t want to have a drink with anyone.

Richard Hoftstadter, the influential American mid-twentieth century historian, eloquently expands this characterisation. “Prohibition,” he wrote, was “a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind”. He describes this “crusading mind” as “linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes and cultivated men.” It was a “rural-evangelical virus”, spread around America by “the country Protestant”.

You can picture these people with fine precision: the ideological ancestors of Pat Robertson and every other Christian fundamentalist crank. This viewpoint, however, is a myth. An excellent myth which appeals to our contemporary intuitions about religion and secularism, freedom and authority. But a myth, nevertheless.

The “crusading mind” that characterised the temperance movement was underpinned not by reactionary impulses, but by the principles of social justice. As Mark Lawrence Schrad puts it in his utterly fascinating new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine, “Prohibitionism wasn’t moralising ‘thou shalt nots’, but a progressive shield for marginalised, suffering, and oppressed peoples to defend themselves from further exploitation”.

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Consider, for instance, someone like Carrie Nation. Born in Kentucky and raised in Missouri, she became infamous for going into taverns and smashing their windows with a hatchet. She has been described as a Bible-thumping Amazon. Some historians blame her strange behaviour on menopause and sexual frustration. If you search for her name on Google Images, the first picture that comes up shows her holding a hatchet on her gloved right hand and an open Bible on her left. She looks absolutely terrifying; Mary Whitehouse decked in black in Midwest America.

But looks, as they say, can be deceiving. As Schrad puts it: “She was not some Bible-thumping, conservative ‘holy crone on a broomstick’, seeking to legislate morality or ‘discipline’ individual behaviour”. Rather, she was a “populist progressive” who viewed alcoholism as a social evil that, among other things, endangered women.

In Kansas City, she built a women’s shelter. And when she retired, she built an institution called “Hatchet Hall”, which Schrad describes as “part rest home for the impoverished elderly, part safe haven for women fleeing abusive husbands, and part homeschool for their children”.

Crucially, she didn’t view the “drinker as a sinner”, but as a victim, like “prostitutes” or “slaves”. The sinner was the person selling the drink. The same is true of other prohibitionists: they made clear that their objection was not against the person drinking, who they saw as a victim, but the liquor traffic that exploited them. Some people today would say they had a saviour complex.

Nation was also anti-racist. She donated “her lecture proceeds to the black African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. And when she did speak at churches that denied blacks, she demanded that all be admitted entry. If that made racists uncomfortable, well, then they could leave”. Indeed, the relationship between temperance, women’s rights, and black civil rights was a close one. Most abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders in the nineteenth century supported prohibition.

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William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the influential abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, was also a staunch prohibitionist. In a letter he wrote in 1830, he states his principles clearly: that because “all men are born equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” it means:

“That intemperance is a filthy habit and an awful scourge, wholly produced by the moderate, occasional and fashionable use of alcoholic liquors—consequently, that it is sinful to distil, to import, to sell, to drink, or to offer such liquors to our friends or laborers, and that entire abstinence is the duty of every individual.”

Women’s rights leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were also prohibitionists, and formed together the New York State Temperance Society. There they proclaimed it was the duty of women “to speak out against the liquor traffic and all men and institutions that in any way sanction, sustain, or countenance it”. At the women’s rights convention organised by Anthony and Stanton in 1866, Frances Harper, whom Schrad describes as “the most prolific and bestselling black poet and author of the nineteenth century”, spoke. Like “most abolitionist suffragists”, she was also a “proponent of temperance”.

Or consider the more recent example of Walter Rauschenbusch. He was a Baptist minister during the Progressive era — the early decades of twentieth century America — who espoused Social Gospel: a form of Christianity utterly dedicated to fighting against social injustice and exploitation. Rauschenbusch saw the liquor industry as a source of these evils, and was cited by Martin Luther King as a key influence.

So why is he overlooked in accounts of prohibitionism? As Schrad puts it: “Walter Rauschenbusch upsets all of our two-dimensional stereotypes of evangelical Christianity. He was compassionate, not commanding; cosmopolitan, not conservative; socialist, not reactionary”. As a result, “the most influential evangelical of his day almost never appears in traditional prohibition histories”.

Nor was the temperance movement limited to America. To strengthen his point that the movement was progressive, rather than reactionary, Schrad widens his analysis by examining prohibitionism around the world. He points out social democrats like Belgian Emile Vandervelde and Swedish Hjalmar Branting espoused it; Tolstoy and Gandhi, advocates of non-violent resistance and opponents of social injustice, also promoted it.

Even Lenin, perhaps the most consequential Leftist of the twentieth century, subscribed to temperance; he viewed Vodka as a tool used by the authorities to stupify and subjugate the masses. (Lenin was also opposed to free love, which he considered a bourgeois rather than proletarian demand. He thought sex had a “social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community”. Shame he was also a mass-murdering tyrant.)

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Closer to home, there was also a temperance movement in Britain and Ireland. Henry Vincent, an influential leader of the Chartists, wanted to connect the Chartist movement with the Temperance Society. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Ireland, under the influence of the Irish priest Thebold Mathew, had a greater proportion of people who followed temperance than anywhere else in the British isles. (Yes, you can read that last sentence again.) As Schrad writes, when mass immigration to the States happened in the wake of the Irish famine, “the Irish Paddy fresh off the boat was statistically more likely to be a teetotaler than the heavy-drinking white, nativist evangelicals in the American heartland”.

Frederick Douglass, the iconic abolitionist leader, was particularly inspired by his friendship with Father Mathew. In a lecture Douglass delivered in Cork, he said: “Seven years ago I was ranked among the beasts and creeping things; to-night I am here held as a man and a brother”. He added: “If I can but forget the position in which I once was, I can turn my attention to teetotalism, and shall be able to speak as a man for a few moments”.

The dignity conferred on him by a teetoller is the same dignity as being a free man — the implication being that slavery and drunkenness are fundamentally akin. Both are ways through which we exploit our fellow man. Douglass emphasised this connection between drunkenness and slavery by stating: “If we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery”. Two days after his speech, Douglass took Father Mathew’s temperance vow.

So why has our understanding of prohibitionism been so distorted? The main reason, I suspect, is because we project contemporary assumptions to the past. Prohibitionism was reactionary because it was led, in our mind, by evangelical Christians — while forgetting or ignoring the fact that the campaign against the slave trade, for instance, was led by evangelical Christians, or that many influential early feminists, like Josephine Butler, were also evangelical Christians.

Yes, abolitionists and early feminists, like the temperance movement, were irritating busybodies. They did often look a bit scary. But they also proudly espoused views — such as the inherent dignity of black people and women — which may seem common sense to us now, but were certainly not back then.

So, strange as it may sound, when we clink our glasses today, let us spare a thought for the temperance movement. Many of the same people involved in that cause were right on fundamental issues. More to the point: the principles that underpinned those correct views were the same principles that animated their prohibitionism. Surely we can all drink to that.

Such stamina seems almost alien today when, for the majority of British office workers, a glass of wine at lunch on a Friday is regarded as positively risqué. And that was before pubs were shut and people started working from home. But now that Dry January is officially over, what if Churchill was actually on to something? To be more precise: what would happen if we drank alcohol throughout the day and maintained a functional level of mild drunkenness?

That is the premise of Another Round, a riotous new film from the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg with a terrific central performance by Mads Mikkelsen. The story revolves around four jaded, middle-aged secondary school teachers — all men — who latch on to a scientific theory which claims that humans are born with an alcohol blood level that is 0.05% too low. To remedy this, to reach mankind’s optimum level of productivity and happiness, they take it upon themselves to drink throughout the day, using breathalysers to make sure they stay at the correct level.

It all sounds a tad deranged — and, of course, things quickly get out of hand — but the actual hypothesis explored in the film is drawn from real life. It is, in fact, the brainchild of Finn Skårderud, a Norwegian psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author. And he’s hardly a complete crank — he’s an international celebrated expert on eating disorders and even works as a psychiatrist for The Norwegian Olympic Committee.

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Does that mean his theory holds any water? Would we be happier and more productive if, as one of the characters does in the film, we started sipping from a bottle hidden in your office’s stationery cupboard?

It seems highly unlikely. But in Silicon Valley, the concept of micro-dosing — taking tiny amounts of LSD or other psychoactive drugs on a regular basis — has become popular in recent years, not just with hippies but with successful entrepreneurs. They report feeling more energetic, more creative and generally more at peace with themselves. Could the same be true for alcohol?

Not if you ask the vast majority of doctors. To start with, they claim, the idea that we have any level of alcohol permanently in our blood — let alone one that is too low — doesn’t make physiological sense. Yes, a number of animals in cold climates do have some alcohol in their bloodstream to effectively act as a de-icer. And there is something known as “endogenous ethanol production” in humans, where your stomach digests carbohydrates and produces an effect similar to fermentation, causing trace levels of alcohol. But it’s not a meaningful amount. Unless you’ve just had a G&T, your blood is naturally free of alcohol.

Still, even if we don’t suffer from an alcohol deficit, could we still benefit from increasing our levels by 0.05%? In terms of physical health, the scientific consensus also appears to centre around a “no”. That’s why, back in 2016, the UK’s chief medical officers reduced the recommended weekly amount men should consume from 21 units down to 14 units — roughly six pints of beer.

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For some doctors, however, even this modest limit is too much. “Basically, consuming alcohol is dangerous to health,” says Rudolf Schutte, a senior lecturer in Medical Science at Anglia Ruskin University. Meanwhile, Peter Anderson, a Professor of Substance Abuse, Policy and Practice, thinks that “there is no level of alcohol consumption that is risk-free.” But if you stick to 14 units, “the evidence shows that the lifetime risk of dying from an alcohol-related condition is about 1 in 100”.

And surely that’s the key thing. It’s a risk. But so too is crossing the road or, during a pandemic, entering a supermarket or jumping on a bus. The question is: how serious is that risk?

David Spiegelhalter, Professor of Understanding Risk at the University of Cambridge, has become something of a household name during the pandemic — at least in my house, he merits a cheer whenever he comes on the radio. He compares that 1% risk of dying to other everyday activities: “An hour of TV-watching a day, or a bacon sandwich a couple of times a week, is more dangerous to your long-term health.” He tells me that there are a lot of “exaggerated claims” about the harms of moderate drinking. In short, if you derive a lot of pleasure from a glass of wine every lunchtime, it’s a risk worth taking.

Of course, to maintain a blood alcohol level of 0.05% during working hours, the four men in Another Round need to drink a great deal more than one glass of wine during the day. (The drink drive limit in the UK is 0.08%.) But then again, they never pretend that their physical health will improve by being permanently, if lightly, sloshed. They argue it’s for the good for their psychological health.

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“This film is about being alive and being activated when you are dwelling through your midlife crisis,” Vinterberg, the director, said in a recent interview. And as Martin, the character played by Mikkelsen, points out, various great men spent much of their waking hours slightly drunk: Ulysses S Grant, Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway.

But while it’s true that Hemingway occasionally went on heroic benders, he didn’t drink while writing. The accusations that Grant was a full-blown alcoholic were mostly spread by his political enemies; it’s likely he was a moderate if persistent drinker. As for Churchill, he was less of an old soak than he was often portrayed. It was Hitler who called him an “insane drunkard” and Churchill himself sometimes thought it beneficial to burnish his own mythology.

However, one drinking habit of his that I did find deeply civilised was his fondness for kickstarting the day with what he called “mouthwash” — a weak whisky and soda, which he would take from about 9.30am and keep continually topped up. But the whisky (simple Johnnie Walker, no fancy malt) would only just cover the bottom of the tumbler; the bulk of the drink was fizzy water. For the morning, at least, Churchill was the embodiment of Another Round’s idea of perfection: just enough low-level inebriation to take the edge off and fire your imagination, but not so much that one made mistakes or felt tired.

Matt Field, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Sheffield and an alcohol and addiction expert, agrees that “alcohol serves a number of purposes”. It may not be good for your physical health, “but it can help you relax and it’s a big part of social occasions”. Interestingly, he points out that “the benefits of regular drink-free days are relatively understudied”. Even so, he still recommends having days off.

Still, perhaps the wisest advice comes from Churchill himself: “I’ve taken away more out of alcohol than it’s taken out of me.” As for whether that’s borne out in Another Round, I couldn’t possibly say.

It is an alarming tale, but it is not a new one – in fact it is probably the most ancient English story of all, a tragicomic relationship that runs through the country’s history for as long as history has been recorded. The melancholy and tragedy of those who sought comfort in ale, wine and spirits, and the public concern about drinking, are one of the oldest continuums in history.

When national newspapers warn about the growing problem of alcohol they are echoing a national fear that dates back at least to the earliest English speakers. As far as the eighth century St Boniface, a West Saxon from what is now Devon, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining that among his people “the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and to our race. Neither the Franks nor the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.”

The Anglo-Saxons drank “oceanic” amounts of beer, as one historian put it, and even local government entirely revolved around beer-drinking sessions, with each parish having a guildhouse (a drinking house) where decisions were made. The communal meeting was known as “an assembly of drinkers,” and this might not have been an entirely terrible idea, since there is some research linking alcohol use with higher levels of trust. And decisions made under the influence of beer are always sensible.

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By “pagans” Boniface meant what we now call Germans (he became a patron saint of Germany) and Scandinavians, who were closely related to the Saxons of Britain and had a similar culture, although they still worshipped the old gods. Scandinavians would settle in large numbers in England in the following centuries, admittedly not as very welcome newcomers, and on top of violence, these “Vikings” were also famous for drinking parties that could go on for days and in which lethal amounts of alcohol were drunk. Hardicnut, one of two sons of King Canute to rule England, drank himself to death at typically boozy wedding feast after ruling for just two years.

Which is probably why you don’t hear much about him.

A few years later, the chronicler William of Malmesbury observed that the English “used to eat till they were surfeited and drink till they were sick” and “drinking in parties was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days”. This, the half-Norman monk believed, helped explain their defeat at the hands of the Normans, led by the abstemious William the Conqueror.

By the high medieval period the average English person — man, woman and child — put away 8 pints of (admittedly weak) beer a day and such was the general air of rowdiness that Church leaders had to occasionally ban ale at weddings; in 1223 the Bishop of Salisbury ordered that all marriages must be sober affairs, and “celebrated reverently and with honour, not with laughter or sport or at public potations or feasts”.

Yet booze was heavily integrated into every part of life, including religion; local parishes were often supported by “church ales”, marathon boozing sessions in which parishioners were encouraged to drink as much as possible. These events could go on for three days, and after a certain time bachelors still able to stand up were allowed to drink for free, the kind of thing that would have the Government Nudge Unit tearing their hair out today.

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On top of this the Church did a lot of the brewing; Cistercian monks at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire produced 1,100 gallons (5,000 litres) of ale every week, both for consumption and sale, fitting in with our idea of medieval England featuring lots of ruddy-faced monks stumbling over. These later stereotypes could reflect some truth; a chronicler from Ely in East Anglia recalls a priest so drunk he could barely walk but who after trying to perform Mass vomited and defecated in front of the congregation.

Alcohol has also long been linked to crime. England has meticulous criminal records going back to the 12^th century, which give a captivating insight into a world of horrific murder rates and agricultural accidents, with drink almost invariably involved.

In one recorded incident, from Gloucester in 1221, a case of trial by battle took place in which men fought with clubs to determine who was guilty. This particular legal dispute, involving old friends called George and Thomas, had begun four years earlier when the two were on the way home, heavily drunk, and George hit Thomas over the head with a stick (years before this Thomas had slept his wife, so there was a simmering resentment). Thomas hit him back with an axe; then George raised the hue and cry, whereby every man in the local area, the hundred, was expected to form a “posse” to track down a wrongdoer. The trial ended with George winning, and his relatives cutting off Thomas’s testicles and throwing them to a group of local boys, who played football with them.

Today newspapers speak with horror about the “middle class” taking up booze but historically drunkenness has been one of the few things that crossed class lines; indeed in recent times alcohol use has correlated with high social status. Court records from 1306 recall how members of elite village families in Bedfordshire were involved in an enormous, drink-fuelled brawl in which John Ketel, “twice juror and twice ale taster… broke the head” of Nicholas, son of Richard Smith and badly beat Richard Benyt, “and moreover did hamsoken upon him”; John, son of Henry Smith, four times juror, “struck Robert Stekedec and drew blood from him,” while his brother Henry Smith “pursued John [Smith]… with a knife in order that he might strike and wound him”.

Then as now, horrific accidents were common, court rolls recording endless cases of individuals stabbing themselves to death, burning down their homes or drowning as a result of alcohol. Sometimes these mishaps could be catastrophic; in 1212 London Bridge caught fire, killing up to 3,000 people, after a so-called “Scot-ale”, bring-your-own-bottle events where “the highest credit was accorded to him who made the most of his fellows drunk and himself emptied the largest tankards” in the words of A.L. Poole.

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During the 12^th century Richard FitzNigel, Bishop of Ely and head of the treasury at the time of Henry II, said the English were “natural drunks”. Richard fitz Neal, a churchman in the service of Henry II, wrote that crime in England was generally explained by “the drunkenness, which is inborn in the inhabitants”. Another churchman, and early grammarian, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, wrote of “that drinker, England” (Anglia potatrix).

Leading by example for almost 20 years was King John, among the worst drunks to ever rule the country. The monarch kept 180,000 gallons of wine at his disposal, just in case he ever ran out, and his butler was personally responsible for ensuring a tun (240 gallons) or two of wine was waiting for him at his next stop, wherever he was. John was unfortunately not the best kind of drunk, either, both violent and lecherous; one low point was when he (allegedly) beat his nephew to death in a drunken rage; his infamous lechery towards the wives and daughters of noblemen is one cause for the rebellion that led to Magna Carta.

The modern anxieties about the English disgracing themselves in Magaluf or Faliraki are nothing new either, that reputation being centuries old. In medieval Paris, where the English comprised one-third of all students at the Sorbonne, they were famous for heavy drinking. In Robert Bartlett’s words they were seen as “most discerning… outstanding for their manners, elegant in speech and in appearance, strong in intelligence and wise in their advice” and yet having three failings – women, “Weisheil” and “Drincheil” the latter two being toasts.

Jacques de Vitry, a theologian and cardinal who lived in Paris at the end of the 12th century, described “the distinctive characteristics of each nation: the French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.”

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The Franciscan friar Salimbene di Adam noticed that it was the Englishman’s habit always to drain off a beaker of wine, saying “he bi a vu” (I drink to you), implying by this that his friend must drink as much as he, and he “taketh it exceedingly ill if any do otherwise than he himself hath taught in word and shown by example”.

This “drinking culture”, as it came to be known in the modern era, has been the target of campaigners down the years; indeed Liberal politicians of the early 20^th century considered banning the rounds system, seeing it as pernicious in encouraging drink.

Yet by the modern era the drinking culture had been tamed considerably. Alcohol consumption in Europe had fallen from the seventeenth century, with the advent of coffee and tea, and aside from events such as London’s gin epidemic, the overall trend has been downward, in England and across the continent. Agricultural labour suited a certain amount of inebriation but industrialisation and urbanisation did not, the latter in particular giving rise to Christian temperance movements that were effective at stigmatising heavy alcohol use. Even in living memory attitudes to drink have changed a great deal, across Europe; the average French person drinks one-third of their equivalent in the 1950s, when primary school children were still given cider and wine at lunch (and the switch to milk was controversial). Even in the last two or three decades, views on lunchtime drinking and other previously-normal rituals have hardened.

Yet while the modern world indulges drunkenness far less, the national characteristic has changed little. The English, both in times of joy and fearful melancholy, will always retreat towards the comforting embrace of Anglia potatrix.

Some sensible folks were prepared: the Yale Club laid on enough booze for its members to last 14 years. For normal people who wanted a drink, however, it meant liquor that made you go blind, mobsters and non-stop Charleston competitions. Pretty much everyone agrees that “the Great Experiment” was a total failure. Yet if you actually look at what its architects wanted, it’s not so clear-cut — because Prohibition wasn’t really about banning alcohol, it was a feminist crusade.

The roots of the temperance movement in both Britain and America lie in the campaign against slavery. Once this had been achieved, rather earlier in Britain (1807 & 1833) than America (1865), all that energy needed a new outlet, someone else needed saving. The new goal was to emancipate the working classes from the tyranny of the saloon bar where the men would spend all their wages before coming home and beating the wife and children. Spirits were cheap and Americans drank an astonishing amount. In his book The Alcoholic Republic WJ Rorabaugh estimates that the average American in the early 19th century drank a pint of spirits per day!

Mostly female-led and female-dominated organisations like the American Temperance Society, Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League fought the good fight, and fought it well. Women didn’t have the vote, but they could exercise their political muscles in other ways. Many of the techniques of the anti-slavery movement were used: religiously-infused public meetings, mass petitions, articles placed in the press and striking prints depicting the misery of alcohol. In Britain there was The Bottle by the caricaturist George Cruikshank showing the alcoholic decline of a family over eight prints. In America lurid novels like Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There by Timothy Shay Arthur made the same argument.

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Some temperance campaigners were more forceful, among them Carrie A. Nation who used to smash up bars with a hatchet. “Hatchetation” she called it. She was born Carrie Amelia Moore but got her stirring name from marrying a Methodist preacher named David Nation. As you can imagine her antics made her very unpopular with America’s saloon keepers; on a visit to Britain, she was almost lynched by a crowd of 3,000 Glaswegians.

These organisations were not campaigning to ban alcohol per se. In his stimulating book, A Short History of Drunkenness, Mark Forsyth writes: “They weren’t really against alcohol. They were against a pattern of behaviour associated with men in saloons. They absolutely did not care if a New York novelist had a glass of claret with her Sunday lunch.”

You will be familiar with this argument from people who are intensely relaxed about minimum alcohol pricing because it won’t affect their Sauvignon Blanc habit or junk food bans while quite happy to eat lardo on sourdough. People went along with the dry movement because they thought that it was aimed at drinkers of hard liquor in saloons, and, it has to be said, the Irish. Yes, like “Whacking Day” in The Simpsons, there was a large anti-Irish element to the Prohibition movement.

Prohibitionists were largely Protestants who didn’t like the influx of whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics and wine-drinking Italians. There was even a whole school of theology like Reverend William Patton’s 1871 work Bible Wines “proving” that Jesus didn’t actually drink wine. It was also town versus country, and there are parallels with Trump here, with your God-fearing rural folk being in favour of Prohibition against city dwellers, often Catholic or Jewish, religions with no traditions of abstinence.

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America was divided into wets and drys, allegiances that cut across party lines. Both Republicans and Democrats had strong dry factions, and as drys tended to vote on the single issue, unlike wets, it was politically expedient to pander to them. Temperance was becoming a powerful political force, and before the First World War, 13 states had already gone dry with 31 others having dry counties. There are still dry counties today, including the one where Jack Daniel’s is made.

In America, the people who held things in balance were the Germans, who dominated brewing and provided most of the political capital against the temperance movement. But after the United States entered the First World War they lost their influence, since who would want to be associated with those nasty war-mongering Germans? With the Germans out of action, Prohibition became a shoo-in. But when it was finally passed in 1919, all those Americans who thought it wouldn’t apply to them were in for a rude shock. The Volstead Act, which was largely dictated by the Anti Saloon League, applied to anything over 0.5% ABV.

Prohibition lasted until 1933, and, it was a success in terms of the original aims of the temperance movement. The male-dominated saloon was no more. The new bars that emerged allowed women. This is one of the ironies of Prohibition, which curbed, to some extent, male drinking, but made it more socially acceptable for women to visit bars as they had been welcome in speakeasies. Drinking became an equal opportunities past-time. What could be more feminist than that? Yet many Americans stayed dry, and by 1939, 42% of the country still didn’t drink.

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I have seen the damage cannabis does

By Peter Hurst

It had some positive unexpected side effects. Many Americans discovered a love for Italian food when they realised that immigrant restaurants had access to wine either smuggled in or home-made from Californian grapes. White people mixed with black people in cities like New York where they picked up a love of jazz music. A newspaper columnist wrote: “the night clubs have done more to improve race relations than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades.”

The Catholic Church became unusually popular as it was exempt from Prohibition for altar wine. Meanwhile, the rest of the world benefitted as bartenders went to London and Paris, spreading cocktails and jazz music. Hotels all over the world opened American bars to cater to tourists escaping Prohibition. It was boom time for Scotch whisky, since Scottish producers had no qualms, unlike their Irish cousins, of shipping vast quantities of booze to the Bahamas or Canada to be smuggled into the US.

Of course, it wasn’t all cocktails and Duke Ellington. American society at all levels was corrupted by making such a staple illegal and putting it in the hands of organised crime. Prohibition was the making of the American Mafia. And surely the curbing of America’s hard liquor habit could have been achieved with more moderate legislation?

It was also a disaster for the American drinks industry, one which it has not fully recovered from. Hundreds of regional brewers closed to be replaced after repeal by a few giants, Californian wine only took off again in the 1970s, and the American whiskey business, once the biggest in the world, was destroyed. Selling alcohol is still incredibly bureaucratic. Only now with the emergence craft beer and the rediscovery of classics like rye whiskey, is the industry returning to its pre-First World War vibrancy. One hundred years after the Volstead Act was instituted, Americans are still feeling the effects of Prohibition.