Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart apologises for smoking opium in Iran

Tory leader hopeful Rory Stewart has admitted he smoked the class A drug opium in Iran and has described it as a “stupid mistake”.

The International Development Secretary said he smoked opium at a wedding 15 years ago and has gone on to see the damage that the drug has done to communities.

Mr Stewart is currently on a tour of the UK in a bid to drum up support for his leadership bid following Theresa May’s resignation speech.

Mr Stewart said: “I’ve seen it as a Prisons Minister. It was something that was very wrong, I made a stupid mistake.

“I was at a wedding in a large community meeting and somebody passed this pipe around the room and I smoked it – I shouldn’t have done, I was wrong.”

Mr Stewart previously served as a governor in Iraq during the Iraq war.

It comes after Mr Stewart told the Telegraph that the opium “had no effect” on him “because I was walking 25-30 miles a day”.

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He told the Daily Telegraph: “I was invited into the house, the opium pipe was passed around at a wedding. I thought – this is going be a very strange afternoon to walk – but it may be that the family was so poor they put very little opium in the pipe.”

Mr Stewart was elected MP for Penrith And The Border in 2010.

He is in competition with Boris Johnson, Dominic Grieve and Michael Gove as the frontrunners of the Conservative Party leadership contest.