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<\/p>\nEvery once in a while when I was in my 20s, under-age schoolboys would accost me as I went into the tobacconist for my daily fix of cigarettes and beg me to buy some for them: ‘Pssst! Mister! If you get us ten Woodbines, I’ll give you the cash!’<\/p>\n
This hasn’t happened to me for many years \u2014 partly, I suspect, because few under-18s can afford the prices shops charge for gaspers these days, at well over \u00a314 for a packet of 20, but also because I now look so elderly and forbidding that they don’t fancy their chances of recruiting me as a co-conspirator.<\/p>\n
Anyway, why would they bother to hang around outside newsagents, pleading with strangers to buy them cigarettes, when they can get all the poison they crave from the dirt-cheap, black-market, fruit- flavoured vapes flooding schools?<\/p>\n
Even in those far-off days of the 1970s, however, I always refused to buy cigarettes for minors. I would never encourage anyone, of any age, to take up smoking. It’s a revolting, smelly habit \u2014 and that’s quite apart from its ruinous effects on our health and our wallets.<\/p>\n
Indeed, my watchword where my 50-year smoking addiction is concerned, as in so many other areas of my life, has always been: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’<\/p>\n
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I always refused to buy cigarettes for minors. I would never encourage anyone, of any age, to take up smoking (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
That said, I’m in two minds about the latest proposal Rishi Sunak is said to be considering in his doomed effort to make Britain smoke-free by 2030.<\/p>\n
This is the policy, pioneered by the New Zealand government last December, under which the legal age for buying cigarettes will rise yearly until the last smoker in the country is dead. To be precise, the law in New Zealand now bans the sale of tobacco to anyone born after January 1, 2009.<\/p>\n
My first reaction to this news was that it seemed much fairer than an immediate ban on all tobacco sales, long favoured by anti-smoking fanatics.<\/p>\n
Like so many others, after all, I became addicted to the evil weed at a time when it was perfectly legal to buy and smoke it. As I’ve often complained, it would be cruel and wrong to make the law-abiding among us suffer the agonies of withdrawal, simply because fashions have changed and an intolerant, non-smoking majority is now in the ascendant.<\/p>\n
Say what you like about the plan now under consideration, but at least it would answer that objection, deterring young people from taking up the filthy habit while leaving me and my fellow ageing addicts free to carry on destroying our health and impoverishing ourselves on the pavement outside the pub.<\/p>\n
Certainly, the Prime Minister will have been encouraged by the YouGov poll in yesterday’s i newspaper which found that a huge majority supports a yearly increase in the legal smoking age, either ‘strongly’ (49 per cent) or ‘somewhat’ (22 per cent), while only 17 per cent oppose it.<\/p>\n
Who can blame Mr Sunak if he calculates that by adopting the New Zealand plan, he may find himself on to a much-needed vote-winner?<\/p>\n
Think the policy through, however, and you’ll soon see how strange it begins to look. Will tobacconists of the future be obliged to ask 50 and 60-year-olds for ID, before they can sell them 20 Silk Cut or a couple of ounces of Gold Leaf?<\/p>\n
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I’m in two minds about the latest proposal Rishi Sunak is said to be considering in his doomed effort to make Britain smoke-free by 2030 (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
More surreal still, will our grandchildren live to see 85-year-olds, born after 2008, loitering outside newsagents, begging a passing 86-year-old: ‘Oy, mate, be a sport and buy us a packet of Marlboro Reds!’<\/p>\n
All right, I grant you that if we follow New Zealand, it’s highly improbable that anything like this will come to pass. It’s much more likely that as the years go by, and the market for legally-sold tobacco ages and shrinks, legitimate outlets will simply stop selling the stuff, which is clearly what Mr Sunak wants.<\/p>\n
But I reckon he’s fooling himself if he reckons that by progressively restricting legal sales, he’ll ever achieve his goal of a smoke-free Britain. As for his hopes of stamping out smoking before 2030, by which time a policy modelled on New Zealand’s would hardly have begun to bite, well, that’s surely pure fantasy.<\/p>\n
Indeed, we’ve already seen how one of the chief effects of recent Budgets, in which successive chancellors have tried to make us quit by hugely increasing the tax and duty on tobacco, has been to boost cigarette-smuggling and the lucrative black market, much as Prohibition in America was a godsend to Al Capone.<\/p>\n
Which brings me to the question of policing a New Zealand-style scheme.<\/p>\n
While shoplifting and knife-crime grow ever more rife, and burglaries go uninvestigated, can you really see the authorities devoting scarce resources to checking the dates of birth of shoppers emerging from the tobacconist?<\/p>\n
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He’s fooling himself if he reckons that by progressively restricting legal sales, he’ll ever achieve his goal of a smoke-free Britain (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
The example of cannabis hardly gives grounds for optimism. This mind-altering, psychosis-inducing drug has been banned for recreational use in the UK since 1928. Yet with the police turning a blind eye to those who smoke it publicly, the streets in my neck of South London veritably stink of the stuff these days, as never before.<\/p>\n
Does anyone seriously think the authorities would show greater zeal, or enjoy greater success, in stamping out smoking tobacco among people born before 2009? If the Prime Minister believes that, he’ll believe anything.<\/p>\n
Mind you, I have a great deal of time for Mr Sunak. I like his obvious intelligence and his reassuring air of unflappable competence. I’m also impressed by his decision to devote himself to public service, despite his being rich enough to live a life of pure self-indulgence.<\/p>\n
But if he has a fault, apart from his failure to excite (perhaps not such a bad thing after our surfeit of excitement under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss), it’s that he seems to believe we could all be a lot more like him, if only we had the right guidance.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking in particular of his ambition to make all children study maths up the age of 18. Of course, he himself has a very good head for figures \u2014 and he’s far from the only mathematical wizard who believes any child can master the subject, if properly taught.<\/p>\n
Well, all I can say is that at my fearfully expensive schools, I was taught by some of the best maths teachers money could buy. But though I’m not proud of it, I’ve always been utterly hopeless with numbers \u2014 and not, I assure you, for want of trying. Being forced to plug away at maths until I was 18 would have killed my enjoyment of school stone dead.<\/p>\n
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Mr Sunak may think it’s easy to give up, since he’s never been hooked. Indeed, I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me over the years that I’d find it a doddle to quit<\/p>\n
It’s the same with my smoking addiction. Mr Sunak may think it’s easy to give up, since he’s never been hooked. Indeed, I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me over the years that I’d find it a doddle to quit, if only I put my mind to it. To them, I can only reply: ‘Speak for yourselves!’<\/p>\n
For longer than I care to remember \u2014 ever since cigarettes reached the dizzying price of \u00a31 a packet \u2014 I’ve often tried to kick the filthy habit. I just can’t.<\/p>\n
Indeed, my latest attempt began at the end of last month, when I embarked on a four-week break from work \u2014 the longest I’ve ever gone without appearing in the public prints since I started in journalism almost half a century ago.<\/p>\n
My hope was that without the pressure of having to write, I might at last summon the willpower to break free of my enslavement to tobacco. Five weeks on and here I am miserably shelling out almost \u00a315 a packet, enduring all the humiliation modern society heaps upon us smokers \u2014 and puffing away more than ever.<\/p>\n
Now, no doubt this would be a much healthier, more productive country if only the population were more like Mr Sunak \u2014 God-fearing, hard-working, public-spirited, devoted to family, good at maths and a teetotal, non-smoker to boot.<\/p>\n
But please, Prime Minister, have pity on those of us less perfect than yourself \u2014 and stop trying to force us to be as good.<\/p>\n