THAT William Hague, what a lad. Normally, you would be looking at Mr Hague for quite a while before thinking, "I bet he could sink 14 pints". But how we have underestimated the Tory leader. Mr Hague reveals his history as a secret drinker in an interview published today in a glossy men's magazine.

Apparently, when he was a lad, William Hague spent the summers working for his family's soft drinks firm, hauling crates of fizzy pop to pubs across South Yorkshire.

"We used to have a pint at every stop and we used to have about ten stops a day," Mr Hague tells GQ magazine. "You worked hard so you didn't feel you'd drunk ten pints by four o'clock - you used to sweat so much."

After swallowing all those pints, the young Hague went home for tea, then headed out for an evening's drinking.

You might think this was just a good silly season story, a spot of entertaining nonsense to fill out a few August inches. Well, it was certainly amusing that reporters sent to Rotherham could find no one with any memory of such a boozy past.

One landlord was dismissive, saying that the young Hague was known as "Billy Fizz and Billy the Pop. The idea of him sinking 14 pints is laughable."

Well, yes, that was my first thought, too. But it is true that the indiscretions of youth often involve drinking large amounts or indulging in various illegal substances.

Most of us used to drink more than we now do, and as Mr Hague says of his beer binge days: "I think when you're a teenager you can do that."

My own teenage years saw the occasional seven-pint nights, though now two pints is more usual and three is approaching recklessness. But then I just grew up to be a journalist and not a politician.

There are a number of possible explanations for William Hague's drinking past.

One is that he might have muddled his drinks. That dark liquid he was quaffing so enthusiastically might not have been beer at all. After all, dandelion and burdock does look like beer in a certain light, I'm sure.

You can imagine the landlords saying: "Oh, look, it's Billy the Fizz. Give him a dandelion and burdock and see if he can spot the difference."

Or it could just be that Mr Hague is inventing a colourful past in an attempt to be more appealing.

It must be irritating to be so deeply etched on the nation's memory as that geeky 16-year-old who spoke to the Tory party conference.

So now we have a new Hague icon, the boozy teenage lad about town. In providing us with this image, Mr Hague tries to over-turn his Tory Boy past by showing that he was more than a politics-obsessed wonk.

The trouble is, it just doesn't sound true, and, I ask you - 14 pints! The very notion is enough to make you smile and then shudder.

Politicians are always trying to throw colourful light on their dull pasts. They do this to appear more human, more like the rest of us.

American President Bill Clinton famously admitted to smoking cannabis while at Oxford, though with the rider that he didn't inhale. Such a defence would have been available to Mr Hague, though trying to maintain that you drank but didn't swallow is a little more difficult.

Tony Blair has his denim shirts, electric guitar and a student past with the Oxford college rock band, Ugly Rumours. Mo Mowlam used to smoke joints.

And so the political present unfolds into the personal past.

Mind you, there is some comfort in William Hague's boozy reminiscence.

I bet he used to talk just as much sense after 14 pints as he does today when stone-cold sober.