He was equally ambivalent about binge drinking, in a newspaper column he wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 2005 in with he admitted finding it ‘rather admirable to get bladdered, leathered, rat-arsed and otherwise hogwhimpering drunk.”
"‘We drink the Russians off the balcony; we drink the Ukrainians under the table. Of our teenagers, 40 per cent have been dead drunk more than 10 times in the past 12 months, compared with a piffling 7% of French teenagers,” he chortled.
“It was as I was skimming through these statistics that I suddenly had an insight. I realised to my horror that I was reading the figures with pride," he said.