NADINE DORRIES: How my lovely Cotswolds was hit by UK's cocaine crisis

I’m lucky enough to live in what I believe is the most beautiful, bucolic part of the country. Not a day goes by when I don’t pinch myself, aware of where my life began in the poorest part of Liverpool and grateful – doubly so – that we arrived in the Cotswolds when my children were still young enough to enjoy the benefits of a simple country life.

All three trotted their ponies along winding lanes and their cherished childhood memories are of long, hot summers, with pony-club camps and the front door always left unlocked. Life was simple – if chaotic, thanks to too many horses and dogs.

Here in the heart of the Cotswolds, we felt that we were keeping the children safe: protected from some of the harsh realities of city life my late husband and I had experienced growing up. We had played on streets by day that were walked on by drunks and prostitutes at night. We wanted better for our children.

However, over the years, there has been one noticeable change in the Cotswolds – which in recent months has been brought home to me with a jolt. It’s not just that the area has become popular with A-list celebrities, or that the price of property now equals that of London. It is something far darker and more sinister.

Behind the scenes in these honey-stone villages runs a sprawling county lines drug supply chain. In particular, the use of cocaine has become widespread and almost normalised.

County lines is the name given by the police to the gangs who move Class A drugs from major cities into rural locations. Albanian cartels tightly control almost the entire supply and distribution of drugs in Britain. I say ‘almost’ because, with a weirdly distorted sense of pride, I am reliably informed the only place in the UK where the Albanians have no purchase remains Liverpool.

There, Scousers – harder than any Balkan gangster – still control the flow of drugs into and out of the city. So advanced are the supply chains, and so greedy the users, that Britain now boasts the second-largest number of cocaine consumers per capita in the world.

And it’s increasingly obvious to me that the Cotswolds is an unlikely epicentre of this epidemic. I’m told that the CCTV covering a local cricket club is picking up cars coming and going in the early hours of the morning several times a week. Neighbours tell me these are clearly drug drop-offs. Are we supposed to accept this as just part of modern life?

It became apparent to me how normalised the use of this vile drug is here just a few weeks ago, at 7pm one Friday evening when I popped into a Chinese takeaway not far from where I live.

As I opened the door of the restaurant, I surprised a man in his early 40s who was openly snorting a line of cocaine straight off the back of his iPhone in the waiting area, where he thought no one could see him. I could quite easily have had a child with me. ‘What are you doing?’ I blurted out. He stared at me. ‘I know this isn’t normal,’ he replied, as he stood up, pushed past me and hurried outside.

But the fact is, here in the Cotswolds, what he was doing is now very normal indeed. Nor did he look to me like someone up from London for the weekend, bringing his hedonistic city ways with him. There was no mistaking that he was a local thanks to his unofficial Cotswolds uniform: a leather-trimmed navy Schöffel waistcoat, a checked shirt and corduroy trousers. Think Kaleb Cooper from Jeremy Clarkson’s farm just up the road – although I’m sure Kaleb never touches anything stronger than his boss’s famous Hawkstone beer.

Just as I was feeling sorry for this man – who, after all, is an addict deserving sympathy, as well as a criminal deserving punishment – he staggered back in through the door. ‘It does no harm!’ he spat at me as he snatched his order from the counter.

And there it was: the lie that I have been told over and over again by the many drug users I have met and known through the years. ‘It does no harm’ are the four words that tell you how addicted a user is – deluding themselves on so many levels.

Only days after the incident in my local takeaway, I witnessed what I suspect was a county lines drop-off just a mile from my own picturesque village. Driving home late one night after a dinner in London, I stopped at a set of temporary traffic lights. As I waited, I noticed a woman in her late fifties leaning against a dry-stone wall clutching a large holdall.

At first I was concerned and wondered: was she lost? Did she need help? Then, from behind me, a black Range Rover sped up and quickly parked on the side of the road. A man jumped out of the passenger seat as the woman zipped open the holdall. He grabbed something that was inside and shoved it into his anorak. Then he took another package from his pocket and shoved it into the holdall.

As the light changed to green, the woman zipped up her bag. The man jumped back into the car, slamming the door. As I drove off, the Range Rover hurtled past me and accelerated into the night. This had all lasted less than two minutes.

My heart was pounding madly. As I neared my village, I came upon another surprise. A man and a woman in their thirties were walking up the road back the way I had come. Bear in mind it was after midnight; there are no streetlights, no pavements, and they were using their phones’ torches to guide them along the dark lane. My first thought was: where could they possibly be going at this time of night? And then it dawned on me, they must have been going to see the woman with the holdall. Yes, I could be wrong – but why else would they risk life and limb travelling on those dangerous roads at that time of night, except to buy drugs?

I tend to keep my counsel when I’m among people who like to boast of their drug use. I say nothing when, as the coffee is being served following a delicious and glittering dinner party round these parts, someone at the table asks (or doesn’t bother to ask) the host, ‘Do you mind?’ And then takes out the cocaine, snorting it and then offering it round the room, in the same way people once did with cigarettes.

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Soon afterwards, the conversation invariably turns dreary and self-indulgent. An unwelcome side effect of cocaine is that its users never know when it’s time to shut up – especially, I find in my capacity as a politician as well as a columnist, when they won’t stop talking about how much better they would have run the country had they been in power.

These individuals would stick their fingers in their ears, metaphorically speaking, if you told them that their addiction – and, yes, it is an addiction – meant that they are complicit in a deadly supply chain reliant on their ‘recreational’ habit. That they were directly linked to dark and violent acts taking place on the other side of the world, where coca leaves are processed in Ecuador or Colombia, brought here by criminals and desperate people, then dropped off in Stow on the Wold.

What would they say to being told that every gram of cocaine they buy arrives in the Cotswolds thanks to the abuse, torture, blackmail, exploitation and, increasingly, the murder of children and young people from poor communities and backgrounds? That their ‘harmless’ habit sustains a county lines network reliant on human misery?

The domestic cocaine market is now estimated to be worth £4billion, with almost 1 million users taking the drug annually. In January, a Daily Mail investigation showed that cocaine is now at record levels of purity in Britain, with the Cotswold Journal suggesting that samples of the ultra-pure drug were being found locally. While it’s bad enough when cocaine and other drugs are cut with chemicals that properly belong under the kitchen sink, this new pure, uncut cocaine is hugely dangerous: attributed to a sharp rise in sudden deaths of users. Cocaine-related deaths are at an all-time high in Britain, making up one in seven of all deaths from drug poisoning – the vast majority in men.

The evidence is increasingly showing a steep rise in cocaine-related heart attacks in middle-aged people – and even in some younger ones. But you can’t tell the users that, because of course, ‘it does no harm’.

All these are sights I would never have seen in the Cotswolds even five years ago – and they’ve shocked me to my core. But should I be shocked? Having worked in Westminster for 25 years, I am not naive. I’ve never taken any illegal drug myself, but it is regularly reported that traces of cocaine have been found throughout the House of Commons and elsewhere on the Westminster estate. I myself have witnessed a Cabinet member staggering along the Cabinet Office corridor in the middle of the afternoon: at first I thought he was drunk, but then another MP rubbed his finger under his nose in a mocking gesture to tell me what was really going on.

So why does what is happening in the Cotswolds upset me so much? It’s because this place was my escape from an environment where crime was ubiquitous, even though drugs were unknown. It was my family’s safe space – and I feel like it’s been broken into. Now the darker side of life has travelled along the motorway and into the villages. The streets of the Cotswolds may be full of tourists by day, filling the tea shops and buying gifts. But by night, they have become the territory of hardened drug dealers. And too many people around these parts support that dark and deadly world.