To the non-smokers: Wait till they outlaw your little pleasure (2024)

One of the nicest men I've known died on Tuesday, a couple of months short of his 67th birthday and just a week after I enjoyed a last pint with him. Along with legions of others who loved his ­company, I shall miss him more than I can say.

Christopher Locke was one of our gang of old buffers who would gather most lunchtimes of the working week at a pub near the Mail's London office, where we would sit together outside, smoking and drinking our pints, ­swapping anecdotes and generally moaning about the incomprehensible idiocies of the modern world.

These days, we survivors still meet there once a week, though some have retired and others have moved away.

As it happens, it was our shared ­addiction to Marlboro Reds that first threw Chris and me together, 17 years ago this summer, soon after the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces came into force.

Indeed, there's an instant ­camaraderie among smokers, exiled as we are to the pub garden or tables on the pavement, come sunshine, rain, blizzard or ­hailstorm. It springs from the natural fellow-feeling experienced by members of the same persecuted minority, a shared dislike of being bossed about by the Nanny State and a devil-may-care attitude to our health.

Before I go an inch further, I must stress with all the vehemence at my command that I wouldn't encourage anyone to take up smoking. In fact, I urge very strongly against it.

Quite apart from the terrible damage it does to our lungs, throats, cardiovascular systems, teeth and gums (I have a smile that terrifies small children), it's ruinously expensive these days, at more than £16 a packet for some brands.

But then, as my four sons will be quick to testify, my watchword has always been: do as I say, not as I do.

Anyway, it soon turned out that Chris and I had more in common than our filthy habit and shared love of ­traditional pubs and real ale. For one thing, it emerged that we were both in the ­newspaper trade (he was a brilliant sub-editor on London's Evening ­Standard, which then had offices in the same building as the Mail).

We had both been at Cambridge in the 1970s, although we didn't know each other there. What's more, he and I both hooked up with our other halves in 1980. His was Gaye, whom he never married, but adored with all his heart. They stuck together through thick and thin until she died last May — also tragically young, by modern standards. I don't think it's fanciful to say that his ­desolation over her death was a ­contributory factor in hastening his.

True, he and I differed over politics. While I am a tribal, Brexit-backing Tory, he was a tireless Labour supporter and a committed Remainer. He even stood for election as a Labour candidate for his local council, although never ­successfully. (This was much to his relief, he confessed to his friends, since victory would have added hugely to his workload.)

But he belonged firmly to the civilised, Old Labour wing of the party, having no truck with the Corbynite nonsense and identity politics that infect the ­Opposition to this day. So we never fought about politics, except in the most friendly way.

Now I'm going to surprise many readers by revealing that Chris's smoking was not the cause of his death. Although I haven't seen his death certificate, I know that he had bowel cancer, which spread to his liver. He had also suffered a severe adverse reaction to the chemotherapy that was meant to save him.

Whatever the official cause of his death, however, his case will inevitably be added to the great bank of statistics cited to prove the indubitable truth that smokers tend to die young.

Indeed, today's scientists seem to have no scruple about quoting any ­evidence, whether it's misleading or not, that supports what they see as a noble cause.

If you doubt me, think back to the Covid pandemic, when the Chief Medical Officer and others lumped everybody who died with the virus together with those who died of it. The aim, I believe, was to maximise Covid's death rate, so as to scare us all into wearing face masks, washing our hands ­constantly and submitting to months of house arrest without fuss.

Never mind that many of the dead, including my beloved mother-in-law, were in their late nineties (she was 99), when even a cold might have sent them to their graves. Convinced they were fighting for a just cause, the ­scientists, it seems, spun the facts to suit their campaign.

For this reason, I take with a huge pinch of salt the claims put forward that passive smoking poses a lethal danger to non-smokers. Nor do I take at face value the figures plucked out of the air by the anti-smoking lobby, supposedly to prove that my habit is an appalling net drain on the economy. (Leave aside the £10 billion-odd we pay every year in duty and taxes on tobacco alone, which dwarfs the £3 billion or so we're said to cost the NHS. What about the fortune we save the Government by dying young, rather than living for ­decades on triple-locked pensions?)

Yes, all smokers know that our habit is hugely dangerous to our health. But isn't the same true, to a greater or lesser extent, of many other vices and ­pastimes, from drinking too much to overeating, extreme sports and heaven knows what else?

All right, I grant you I've been very lucky up until now, making it to my threescore years and ten without a ­single serious health scare. I also know that because I smoke so much, I'm highly unlikely to reach fourscore. But let's face it, all of us will die of ­something one day. It may as well be smoking as anything else.

Like the late Kingsley Amis, whom I never tire of quoting, I believe 'No ­pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.'

So leave aside the patent absurdity of the measures outlined in Rishi Sunak's Tobacco and Vapes Bill, passed by that shockingly large majority in the ­Commons this week. (For those who've been stranded on desert islands ­without access to the news, this is the ­unenforceable Bill under which anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, will be banned for ever from buying tobacco products, while those born even a day earlier won't be affected).

Is it really the business of Government to ban future generations from enjoying a weed that's given pleasure to millions since Sir Walter Raleigh brought it back from America in the 16th century?

The countless non-smokers who back Mr Sunak on this issue may think ­nothing of outlawing a pleasure they don't ­happen to share. All I can say to them is: 'Just you wait till they ban your own.'

As for me, I'll always have cause to be grateful for my vice, if only because it introduced me to that dear, clever, kind and stoical man Chris, with his fund of amusing anecdotes and his knowledge of an astonishing range of facts about everything from his beloved cricket to obscure breweries, politics and the arts.

I just wish I'd kept his poignant ­parting gift to me when he finally accepted he was too ill ever to enjoy another cigarette. But like my chances of a long life, that present of a half-­finished packet of Marlboro Reds has already gone up in smoke.