Last Gasp

Before the heavens decided to open, I had been all ready to wander down to The Black Bull for, as much as anything else, one or two last cigars. A very occasional vice of mine, which I’ll have no difficulty giving up entirely, especially in return for never again having to come home smelling of other people’s smoke, whether or not I run the slightest risk of being given cancer by it.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

There is something not right about all of this, and I think I know what it is. Cigarettes, pipes and factory-produced small cigars are terribly Old Labour, while cigars, pipes and the more upmarket brands of cigarette are terribly Old Tory. The former are ever so workingmen’s club, the latter ever so gentlemen’s club. The bubble-permed granny in the bingo hall lights up her Silk Cut at the very moment when her exact contemporary, the Dowager Duchess, is affixing her Rothmans to her cigarette holder as the perfect accompaniment to her gin and Dubonnet.

So I cannot help wondering if this ban would have been brought in under our new Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, rather than his predecessor, Patricia Hewitt. Johnson certainly knows what the inside of a workingmen’s club or a bingo hall looks like, whereas Hewitt probably doesn’t even know what the outside of a workingmen’s club or a bingo hall looks like. In the tradition of many a trade union-based Labour politician past and present, he is no doubt also no stranger to gentlemen’s clubs or Dowager Duchesses.

Are we minutes away from the last gasp of New Labour as we have known it? We can but hope.