Toronto Mayor Rob Ford in drunken ‘murder’ rant

The video was released just days after the mayor of Toronto was forced to apologise for smoking crack cocaine.

The short amateur video clip (above) shows the mayor pacing and pounding his hands together, as he details how he would kill someone. However the person he is talking about, and the context of the clip, is unclear.

“He dies or I die,” says Mr Ford says in the clip. He adds: “I need f****** 10 minutes to make sure he’s dead. It’ll be over in five minutes.”

Minutes after the video appeared on the website of the Toronto Star, Mr Ford emerged from his City Hall office looking dazed, and struggled to find words to answer the many questions from reporters.

I just wanted to come out and tell you I saw the video, it’s extremely embarrassing. Rob Ford

“All I can say is – again – I’ve made mistakes. All I can do is reassure the people that… I just wanted to come out and tell you I saw the video, it’s extremely embarrassing,” he said. “Obviously, I was extremely, extremely inebriated.”

He did not give any details about who he was talking about, despite being asked.

‘Drunken stupor’

The Toronto mayor shot into the headlines around the world on Tuesday, when he admitted he had smoked crack cocaine, “probably in one of my drunken stupors”. He apologised and promised it would never happen again. He had been dodging questions about reports that he had smoked crack for months,

And yet Mr Ford has refused to resign, and is apparently planning to stand for re-election next October. His approval ratings remain at 47 per cent – unchanged since the recent revelations.

However Toronto’s city council could vote next week on a motion to ask the provincial government to remove Mr Ford from his job.

Badly behaved
Mr Ford’s flirtation with Class A drugs is at the more extreme end of the spectrum. But he is not the first politician to fall into a “drunken stupor”, or take drugs.

Bill Clinton: The former US president has admitted that he smoked marijuana when he was a university student. But he famously said it did not count, because he “didn’t inhale”.

Eric Joyce: Only this year, the former Falkirk MP was arrested following an alleged brawl at a parliamentary bar – his second arrest on suspicion of assault (head-butting, to be specific) related to alcohol, after which he resigned. Mr Joyce insisted he had consumed “by any standards a very modest amount”.

Barack Obama: Marijuana was also the offending article for the current US president. Barack Obama admitted that he smoked “maybe a little blow, when you could afford it”, in his autobiography, Dreams from my Father.

George Brown: He was foreign minister during Labour’s government in the 1960s, and was deputy Labour leader for 10 years, but was reportedly drunk for much of that time. That became apparent to the mainstream public when he had a row on television that ended up in a physical fight – and he was forced to apologise.

George Bush: While in office, former US president George Bush was dogged by rumours that he had previously taken cocaine, but Mr Bush has managed to avoid the question. He did deny using any illegal drug since 1974 – when he was 28-years-old – and said that he had drunk a lot of alcohol up to the age of 40.