As David Cameron woke up today to more headlines about smoking cannabis at Eton, I wonder if Barak Obama’s drug past will hinder his bid for the White House.

He has openly admitted taking cocaine as a teenager, saying this about himself in a book he wrote 11 years ago: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. . . . I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

Not pretty words, yet this confession is considered as taking Americans into a new political era, that such revelations are no longer shocking, and Fox News has even suggested he was a drug addict .

Even murkier is the hint that Hillary Clinton could have tipped off the media about Obama’s past, such is her desperation to win the Democratic nomination.

Obama hoped his admission would serve as an example to what others can achieve:

“In an interview during his Senate race two years ago, Obama said he admitted using drugs because he thought it was important for “young people who are already in circumstances that are far more difficult than mine to know that you can make mistakes and still recover.”

What’s clear is that the public cares little about teenage misdemeanors and is much more concerned about the character of our politicians, whether they were bullies, cheats and liars. I’ve heard nothing along those lines. Do you think teenage mistakes should haunt politicians more than 20 years later? Does it bother you at all? Should it make any difference to the political aspirations of Oboma, as well as David Cameron?