This strange plan — with a soupçon of science fiction about it, due to the odd device of the cut-off point, achieved by raising the legal smoking age by one year, every year — is a minor reminder that Rishi Sunak was ever prime minister. Our Glorious Leader Keir Starmer seems to have been with us for so long now — like a kind of political psoriasis — that it seems oddly time-warping to recall that it was only two years ago that the “loveless landslide” happened, making lady columnists feel “fruity” and their male counterparts deeply relieved that “the adults” were “back in the room”.

But before him, there was that nice Mr Sunak, who once admitted at the age of 21, in a 2001 television program called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, that he had no working-class friends: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are working-class…well, not working-class.” Though it’s cringey and shallow (would he dare to have transposed his bubble so openly from class to race?), one might applaud Sunak for simply speaking the truth; the classes are as savagely divided as they were in D.H. Lawrence’s day, probably more so due to the end of the grammar schools. Still, the patronizing paternalism of the smoking Bill, the lack of regard for personal freedom and the perception of the uni-party as a bunch of busybodies who always know better than you what’s best for you, makes it clear for the nth time why we are looking at a landscape in which Reform could replace the Conservatives as the opposition.

Not since Churchill’s cigar has a smoking politician been so identified by his habit as Nigel Farage, who is believed to be a 20-a-day man, even when in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. His man-of-the-people shtick — despite his expensive education and considerable wealth — has been established by the image of him at ease with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other; the pull of hedonism is a great leveler. He called Sunak’s plan “pious grandstanding”; last year, during the Tobacco and Vapes Bill’s report stage, he made a brilliant speech in the Commons: “I have to say, I find the tone of moral superiority in the chamber this afternoon almost unbearable… You clearly believe you are better human beings than those outside of here who choose to pursue activities that you perhaps would not. Well, it’s a bit of a shock, I suppose, to some of you, but there are some of us that like a smoke. We even go for a few pints at the pub. We have a punt on the horses. I even attempt to have the odd doughnut… Because we want to have fun. We want to make our own minds up. You can educate. You can tell us. You can give us the facts. But the idea that this place should make those decisions for other people shows me that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell is alive and well.”

Farage may be pushing it a bit when he heralds smokers as the “heroes of the nation” due to the huge taxes they contribute now that a packet of fags is pushing 20 quid. But he has a point: over 80% of the cost of a packet is tax, meaning that tobacco duty and VAT on smokeables bung the Exchequer around £8 billion a year whereas treating smoking-related illnesses is thought to cost the NHS around £2 billion. Then there’s the brisk “Net Saver” argument, which posits that as smokers often die younger, they save a vast amount of public money which might be spent on we oldsters, including our pensions and care homes.

Farage has it right when he leans into the pub as an important liberty bellwether. It’s telling to compare the delighted reaction of drinkers when Farage walks into a pub with the loathing felt towards Labour politicians, which became so extreme last winter that 250 pubs banned them. 

Looking back, the indoor smoking ban of 2007, under the Blair/Brown government, was the start of the current existential trouble which pubs find themselves in: one a day closes permanently now. That the government finally understands that it has pushed the hospitality industry too far was indicated by the fact that they pulled back from the proposed ban on smoking in pub gardens in 2024 — but it’s too late now. It’s poignant to recall that the name “public house” came about at a time when many actual houses where the poor lived were barren; the pubs ensured that the working classes had somewhere warm and welcoming to go to. Now that homes once more risk being dark and cold when the summer’s gone, many people will have to walk further to find a friendly light.

Does prohibition ever work? The tobacco black market is already huge. Christopher Snowdon, an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said of Sunak’s strange legacy: “You’re going to have a fairly large, informal market of smokers who are old enough to buy cigarettes selling cigarettes to people who are not old enough. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on consumption — the problem with prohibition is it leads to massive black markets and a lot of tax revenues gone.” So in its crazed compulsion to control the personal behavior of its citizens, the government will make itself far poorer — but bossiness is its own reward, if you’re that way inclined. 

Already, plenty of vaping shops sell contraband foreign fags on the cheap. The one nearest me sells “illicit whites”, literally from under the counter; manufactured in the UAE and China, they are around half the price of legal smokes. They taste like they’ve been produced by the government to put people off smoking, but they sell like hotcakes. They even have the mandatory gory health-warning pics on them, to make them look legal. Surely the kids will end up buying these — or else take up vaping. A primary school teacher I know says it’s not unusual for nine-year-olds to be enthusiastic and habitual vapers. It sounds like vapes have caused more problems than they’ve solved.

Why doesn’t the government treat the alcohol industry with similar ruthlessness? More than 10,000 people a year in the UK die from alcohol-specific causes. Alcohol abuse costs the NHS £4.9 billion, enough to pay the salaries of almost half the nurses in England; it costs the state £27 billion through everything from lost productivity to violent crime. So why not put photographs of beaten-up women on cans of strong beer? Or mangled cars on premium spirits? No one ever took a life because they had one too many fags.

I realize that I’m not a typical smoker. A pack will last me a week — and that’s shared with my husband. It would never occur to me to get the gaspers out at home; I only ever fancy one after a nice lunch out. I daresay I’m ignoring the science. But there are odd glitches in the modern mentality which insists that smoking is a social evil beyond all others. The Green Party plans to legalize crack cocaine while agreeing with the paternalistic attitude of the mainstream parties towards phasing out smoking. Last week, a report was released suggesting counterintuitively that young non-smokers who eat lots of fruit and vegetables may be more likely to develop lung cancer. “Have your 5 a day — and pass away!” was a public health message we never predicted. In 2023, the World Health Organization claimed that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; yes, smoking can kill, but the urge to make friends over a cheeky fag in the freezing cold is a life-enhancing one.

Maybe I’m swayed by my own peculiar olfactory tastes. One of the dumbest lines about smoking — so dumb that anyone who utters it immediately identifies themselves as a half-wit — is “It would be like kissing an ashtray!” Personally, I find the scent of fresh smoking attractive, like fresh sweat, though of course nothing is nice when it’s stale. Many perfumes use tobacco as a “note” —Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille is particularly lush. 

My first remembered smell is that of my father, who had smoked 30 un-tipped Woodbines a day since he was a kid. He died of mesothelioma, which he contracted as a teenage boy working on the building of one of the proliferation of NHS hospitals after the war; of damage caused by tobacco, there was no trace. As with so many health-related issues, so much of it really is the — excuse the pun — luck of the draw.

And yet, the evil of cigarettes has not been fully extinguished. Which is why the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is proposing that those in their late teens should become the last generation ever to smoke legally in this country. Policy to be announced this week in the King’s Speech will eradicate tobacco from our society as surely and comprehensively as cannabis and cocaine have been.

None of this is particularly new, of course. Official disapproval of smoking goes back as far as James I’s 1604 pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco, though it took another three centuries for the government to get fully involved. The spur then was the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, which saw a flood of recruits to the colours, young men who were employed as servants, shopworkers, clerks and labourers. But if working-class patriotism was in fine fettle, the same could not be said of working-class health. Around three in 10 who applied to join the ranks were rejected on medical grounds. This worrying state of affairs, said some, was down to the advent of the cheap cigarette.

“The chief cause of unfitness was proved to be smoking,” declared Percy Everett, a magazine editor who later co-wrote Scouting for Boys with Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell. The habit was responsible for “upwards of 80 diseases, including blindness and cancers of the lower lip and tongue, and is credited with killing 20,000 each year”. In short, it was “an evil which is sapping our boyhood’s strength, and so undermining our national manhood”. Smoking, like masturbation, was linked to blindness and insanity.

In response to such concerns came the Children’s Act of 1908, passed by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, which introduced the first restrictions. It became illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone under the age of 16, and policemen and park keepers were authorised to confiscate tobacco, cigarettes and cigarette papers from underage smokers; they could also search boys for such items — though, for reasons of delicacy and decency, not girls.

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Adults, however, continued to smoke freely for six decades, until the evidence of the harm it caused became too great to ignore. The medical profession demanded a government intervention and in 1965 — when 70% of men and 40% of women smoked — television adverts for cigarettes were banned. (Other tobacco products fared better: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” ads were still being aired on TV into the Nineties.) The ensuing introduction, in 1971, of warnings on packets — “Smoking can damage your health” — wasn’t entirely successful. A 1975 poll showed that a third of smokers didn’t believe cigarettes could kill. The wording was accordingly ramped up, to include the word “seriously”.

There was also an effort to encourage switching to weaker cigarettes. A league table was published, showing the potency of the various brands. The implication was that if you were on Capstan Full Strength — which offered 38mg of tar per cigarette — you might be better off if you traded down. The Embassy Ultra Mild had just a tenth of those levels.

Advertising restrictions didn’t apply to sponsorship, though. Sport was a particularly attractive partner, since it enabled the brand-names and logos to be displayed on television. Snooker even offered the opportunity to see sportsmen light up while competing. There was also footballer John “Bionic” Osborne, a goalie for West Bromwich Albion, who was famously photographed having a quick smoke during a match in 1972, while the ball was down the other end.

Some, feeling that government action was painfully slow, took matters into their own hands. In 1971, the New Inn in Appletreewick, West Yorkshire declared itself Britain’s first no-smoking pub. It was reported that takings slumped. Later that year, a GP made the news when he refused to accept as patients a 45-year-old woman or her eight children because she had chronic bronchitis and wouldn’t give up smoking. She’d had a 15-a-day habit before the rejection; after, she claimed: “I have become so distraught that I now find I am getting through 30 cigarettes a day.”

Between government initiative and peer pressure, the number of smokers steadily fell, as did the number of places where one could indulge. The restrictions were not always popular, however. In 1982, British Rail banned smoking in the buffet cars of its Southern Region trains, but found itself overwhelmed by complaints and forced to back down. Two years later, smoking was prohibited on Tube trains in London, despite a survey showing only 18% of passengers in favour of a ban and 54% against. By then, only around a third of adults smoked.

It was around this time, though, that public attitudes really changed. Evidence for the negative effects of passive smoking began to accumulate, and there was no coming back from that. In the Nineties, diktats were issued from Brussels that radically reduced the maximum tar yield per cigarette — even as the Common Agricultural Policy was pumping millions into subsidising tobacco production. (An exception was made for Greece, which really liked a strong smoke, and negotiated an opt-out until 2006).

In response to this directive, the other John Osborne — the playwright, not the footballer — wrote a splendidly vitriolic letter to The Times, railing against those who had deprived him of his favourite Turkish cigarettes; “untipped, robust and fragrant”, they were “one of life’s few and reliable pleasures”. The restriction was “craven abasement” to “puny tyrannies”, to countries that had so recently been dictatorships. “As a schoolboy, I narrowly escaped from ‘European’ bombs on my doorstep,” wrote Osborne. “I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips 40 years on.”

Those who objected to government action on smoking — and they tended, like Osborne, to be awkward individualists — insisted that this was a question of the liberty of the individual. The war against smoking was a “new Puritanism”, said Nicholas Ridley, Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary: “A crusade to stop others doing what they want or taking risks with their own lives.” (Ridley refused to give up smoking even when diagnosed with lung cancer.) And when David Simpson, formerly of Amnesty International, took over the anti-tobacco lobby group Action on Smoking and Health in 1979, journalist Bernard Levin spotted an irony: “Have all those years of admirable work on behalf of the oppressed and persecuted taught him nothing about the indivisibility of freedom?”

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Like our modern culture wars, the division has not been between Left and Right: over the years, Conservative, Labour and Liberal governments have all been on the same page about tobacco. Rather, it’s been between polite society — those who know they know better — and those who need to be protected from themselves. John Reid, health secretary in Tony Blair’s government, described the war against tobacco as “an obsession of the learned middle class”, and Diane Abbott saw it in similar terms in 2006: “Under New Labour, the party has gone from speaking for the white working class to speaking at them — whether about junk food or the smoking ban.”

There was some truth in this. The four-decade-long campaign had successfully reduced the number of smokers, but its impact was shaped by income and social class. Cigarettes had become unfashionable among the middle classes, but 42% of unskilled workers still smoked, as did 55% of single mothers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the imbalance remains: those with no educational qualifications are four times more likely to smoke than those with a degree.

Education, taxation and location having not been enough, there now comes a new policy to stub out smoking altogether. Sunak’s proposal is to raise the age at which one can purchase tobacco products by a year, every year, so that those now too young to smoke will forever be too young. It’s based on a similar law passed in New Zealand last year, and it will presumably pass through Parliament without much of a hitch — because in government, and in public opinion, the war has been comprehensively won. A taste for tobacco has become the love that dare not speak its name. Smokers are down to fewer than one in eight of the adult population. A YouGov poll last month showed a third of people supporting the proposed age-restriction; when you added in the 29% who wanted a complete ban immediately, it’s clear that Sunak has the public onside.

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Those who fear similar net-zero campaigns elsewhere — against alcohol, the wrong foodstuffs, cars, fireworks, whatever — might note with concern the pattern of public response to every step of the anti-smoking pathway. First, complaints, then ridicule, swiftly followed by compliance and acceptance. It took a while, but there was no rebellion. That studio laughter on Yes, Prime Minister is the sound of a different world.

Admittedly, the suppression of tobacco was greatly aided by an increased understanding of secondary smoking, but once the principle of prohibition is established, it becomes easier to administer. There’s no known secondary harm from vaping, for example, but restrictions have still been imposed by the Conservative government, and there will be more to come. In particular, there are objections to flavoured vapes, since these are assumed to be more attractive to children.

That’s not new, either. The same thinking was seen in the European directive that banned menthol-flavoured cigarettes — though its most notable objector was not a child, but Helmut Schmidt, the venerable ex-chancellor of West Germany. As well as being possibly the last major European statesman to carry a snuff-box, Schmidt was a chain-smoker, and it was reported that he bought up a stash of 38,000 mint-flavoured fags, which proved sufficient to see him through to his last puff. It’s not clear whether he bought enough. He died just shy of his 98th birthday.