Is alcohol the problem – or the solution?

Many of our MPs are hopeless drunks. Is this a bad thing? What would Winston Churchill say?

If you follow these things you know that Eric Joyce, a Scottish MP, has been arrested after not one, but two drunken punch-ups, in the House of Commons bar.

One Tory MP, appropriately named Mark Reckless, was too drunk to vote on George Osborne’s first budget.

“I normally have just one or two and know when to stop. I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember falling over,” he said.

A friend of mine often saw Harold Wilson socking back the brandy in the restaurant at the Chelsea Cloisters. George Brown’s catastrophic performance which we are still paying for  may not have been entirely unrelated to the amount of plonk he put away.

I come from a family of boozers. In fact I was brought up in a boozer. My mother’s father liked a drink. My father’s mother drank two bottles of gin a day. My mother used to sock away eight bottles of Carslberg Special brew in her sixties.

My father nearly died of drink. After having been dried out, I asked him if he was behaving himself.

“I’ve cut right back, son,” he replied. “No more than eight pints a day, and not a drop before midday.” Mind you, he drank Robinson’s Best Mild, which is, as they used to say, about as strong as maidens’ water.

Churchill was a dedicated consumer: half a bottle of champagne for breakfast, and God knows how much brandy over dinner.

Pitt the Younger – another great prime minister – was offended when the Speaker of the House of Commons suggested he “liked his bottle of port”. “Two bottles, Mr. Speaker” was his response.

When someone told Lincoln that General Grant drank far too much whiskey, he replied “Find out what brand he drinks and send a case to my other generals.”

When I was 2o I read impeccable research into monastery records that suggested that most of the monks in the middle ages must have been permanently rat-arsed.

If so I imagine anyone with any means must have been, too – which I guess explains some of the extraordinarily nasty things they did to each other.

I have skirted the shores of alcoholism for much of my life. I am pretty sure I was tipsy more days than not between 1967 and 2004.

On the other hand I was pissed as a rat – two bottles of red down – when I made one of my most successful pitches for business.

David Ogilvy got one client when, as he put it, he was too “potted” to speak. He just nodded in agreement to everything the client said – a wise strategy, by the way.

Many great writers have liked a drink. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Joyce, Faulkner. Plus another man who won the Niobel Prize for Literature, Winston Churchill.

If you want to have a drink with me – and learn a thing or two about writing – I have a hell of deal going for you.

I think I am safe in saying that the writer you will learn from as a result of that deal likes a drink – he can certainly afford the best.

Incidentally, the greatest mistake for a writer is to wait for inspiration or circumstance. Write every day. Write every time you have an idea. Write no matter what.

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper” – E. B. White.