Smokers in Parliament

Smoke has wrapped itself around and within my memories. In many supposedly free countries, though, it has now been almost completely banned. Hysterical 'asthmatics'--and my granny was really asthmatic, I've seen what that illness does--are around every corner and behind every permeable wall. The idea of licensed premises with air conditioners is universally panned, and good cigars are now samizdat, even in clubs.

In fact, bizarrely, my old Balliol mucker Mark Littlewood, whom I shared not a few smoke-ridden rooms and midnight plots with many moons ago was in the telegraph yesterday presenting smoking as a civil rights issue. This is something of a hobby horse of his.

Neil Clark, of course, has consistently taken this position, to some abuse. I still remember smoking out the Randolph bar with some Maltese toxin Neil had discovered that was disguised as a cigar about three or four years ago. I am sure that my skeleton and whatever tree-rings mark my blood remember those things too, though they can no longer be smelled on my clothes.

There really are great pleasures to a cigar now and then--I enjoyed a cohiba number 2 last week on the balcony of a friend's flat at Imperial wharf, as we watched the helicopters and trained a telescope on the sky. That was one of the memorable experiences of my life.

I did also once keep a pack of something toasted (I think that they were lucky strikes or galoise or something like that) in a drawer in my desk in case I wanted to write and preen my pretensions in my twenties. Letting one hang from my mouth did at least attract one really beautiful woman, who thought I looked like Jaques Prevert smoking it, though we did have a lot to drink that snowy night and I may have misheard her. What can you expect from someone whose childhood smelled largely of Golden Virginia?

There was a time when I really enjoyed an old wood pipe into which I would put various flavoured tobaccos, but the marks of the real smoker, physical and mental were not upon me. I would watch my grandfather, who lived to be a few months off a hundred, producing twirling crowds of smoke from an old cherry wood pipe them spit at a gas fire because it looked real, but the discomfort of my skin and allergies never long survived the warmth with which I regarded him. From Vietnam veterans in Baltimore to my old Donegal grandad, smokers were just more interesting and fun.

Unfortunately, I have a bad family cardiovascular history. This means that, even when I have the chance of a cigar and brandy, I tend to avoid the harder Cuban tobaccos and to go for more mellow fare. That peculiar racing heart one can get the day after a cigar when the body readjusts is not a comfortable thing, though the voice is. Now, my collection of smooth and mellow cigars tends to sit somewhat forlorn beneath a picture of a woman I knew in Paris.

So I have the credentials of an occasional, if not lapsed, smoker. I have none of the zeal of the anti-smoking convert to ban the hobby. Banning things is obviously about social control, at least when perpetrated by the 'post' protestant middle classes.

I am a bit of a libertarian when it comes to things people wish to do to themselves, provided no one else is damaged. Where would FDR, Einstein, and Churchill have been without their nicotine fix, for example? And where would we have been without their quicker thinking nicotinised synapses?

Prescribing the ways in which people spend their leisure time on earth holds no pseudo-religious pleasures for me. I think that smokers' clubs should be allowed, with appropriate air conditioning and staff consent, to run and that on that basis people should be allowed to indulge in their pleasures as they see fit.

I was therefore grateful to the Devil's kitchen who provided the following video. It purports to show two somewhat unsalubrious individuals who made their way into the strangers' bar of the British parliament (which by legislative design is exempt from anti-smoking legislation) and lit up like a couple of TV coppers from the seventies. The picture above, of course, depicts the Metropolitan police during an era of miscarriages of justice, and the setting may be connected.

I am sure that the imputed suggestion that our legislators are some collective form of semi-competent hypocrites and hacks out to look after themselves whilst patronising the natives and filling their boots is a despicable lie.