Writer and presenter tells readers of his new autobiography how he ‘brought noble properties into squalid disrepute’

Stephen Fry has claimed he took cocaine in Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

Detailing his 15-year addiction to the drug, Fry named dozens of exclusive venues where he took the substance, saying he brought them into “squalid disrepute”.

They include: Windsor Castle, Clarence House, Sandringham House, BBC Television Centre, ITV headquarters, an array of private members’ clubs in London, and the offices of the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Spectator and Tatler.

In his autobiography, published on Thursday, Fry wrote: “There is no getting away from it. I am confessing to having broken the law and consumed, in public places, Class A sanctioned drugs. I have brought, you might say, gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant honest establishments into squalid disrepute.”

Describing the incident in the Commons, Fry writes: “Heart beating like an engine, with the slightly trembling devil-may-care desperation of the true druggy, I wiped dry of condensation the rear section of the top of the urinal with the back of my tie, chopped a line there … I took my courage in one hand and my straw in the other and with a sort of coughing House of Commons ‘hear hear!’ roar, sucked in the line and straightened up.”

He added: “I take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignoble premises above and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantlepieces and available polished surfaces that could so easily have been added to this list of shame.”

In his book, More Fool Me, Fry describes his first nervous experience of taking coke in London in 1986, with his hands shaking. Since then, he said he has wasted “tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many hours,” snorting the drug. “By the end of the 1980s I would no more consider going out in the evening without three or four grams of cocaine safely tucked in my pocket than I would consider going out without my legs.”

He added: “I dare say cocaine was ready and waiting for me, but the real reason I embraced it is that I found it could give me a second existence.”

But Fry writes: “I wouldn’t recommend cocaine to my worst enemy.”