‘I am 35,000 feet above Beirut, and I am smoking a fag’: Spectator writers recall their favourite cigarettes

The next generation will never be allowed to buy cigarettes. So we asked some of our writers for their favourite moment with a fag.

Rory Sutherland

One of the last ever cigarettes I had on a plane, I think. Looking back, it was kind of insane that you could ever smoke on aircraft (I think this was on Emirates, around 1997 – at a time when smoking had been banned on western airlines for quite a few years; the middle-eastern airlines, like the Japanese, were slow to the ban). This was the first time I had ever experienced a working telephone on an aircraft, too. And it also coincided with Kathy Burke playing a role in a series of Harry Enfield sketches on TV as Waynetta Slob. I seem to remember calling back to the office very briefly – the calls cost a fortune – and at some point in the conversation, apropos of nothing at all, saying ‘I am 35,000 feet above Beirut, and I am smoking a fag’.

Incidentally the last cigarette I ever smoked was one I bummed off Nigel Farage. Nigel is a Rothmans man, as you would expect. This was, unintentionally, a good strategy for quitting. Have someone famous give you your last cigarette, so that in the event that you give in to temptation by being offered a cigarette by someone less famous, you know you won’t be able to tell that story again when anyone talks about smoking. I suppose there is the risk that someone more famous offers you a cigarette and you decide to upgrade the story. Perhaps Mick Jagger or Kate Moss might turn up at my flat one evening and start handing out Marlboro Lights. There is that risk. But this contingency is unlikely, I think.

Nigel Farage

The first one every morning!

Freddy Gray

My favourite cigarettes have been after going to confession in church. Smoking is not a real sin, even if it is bad for you. And there’s a liberating feeling in lighting up after fessing up. 

My funniest smoking memory is from one night in school when I went into ‘lowers’ – a popular spot for nefarious activities in the woods – and, as I took my first drag, I told a friend that ‘Marshall is being such a dick at the moment’ – or words to that effect. ‘Am I now Frederic?’ thundered back Mr Marshall, my actually very good housemaster, sitting behind me on a fallen tree in the dark.

Aidan Hartley

While covering a war in Ethiopia 32 years ago I was accompanying guerrilla fighters who captured an ammunition dump, which then began to explode. I guess it had been booby-trapped by retreating forces. The earth split open like a volcano, sending a ball of fire mushrooming into the sky as we scampered away across fields with rockets and bombs raining down on all sides, bursting in plumes of earth and smoke. We took refuge in a dry riverbed with steep sides, while shrapnel bounced around above us. The sky was filled with missiles, moaning and fizzing like Catherine wheels. For the next hour, I chain-smoked my way through a pack of cigarettes. They got me through it all while I prayed that if me and my group of guerrillas survived, I’d finally go to church. After the rebel forces captured Addis Ababa, I did, but not very often. 

Julie Burchill

I started smoking the summer I turned 12 – the summer I first read Dorothy Parker. I was aiming to be a brilliant writer and smoking seemed the surest way to start out. I kept at it until my 40s. When it was banned in the bars and restaurants where I (still) spend half my waking hours, I gave it up overnight.

The ease with which I did this might have something to do with the fact that I never got the hang of inhaling. (The only thing I didn’t inhale during my long, louche life.) But then, I gave up cocaine overnight after 40 years bang on it – and I’ve never missed that either. I think I must have the opposite of an addictive personality.

I know it’s immature, but I still feel thrilled when a new person I like turns out to be a smoker, even though I know it’s bad for the poor creatures. My dad was a chain-smoker and I adored my dad – maybe this is why I’ve always found the smell of smoke on people attractive. So I’m not a smoker, but I’m definitely an ally – and I still carry cigarettes and a lighter in my handbag, just in case a smoking mate gets caught short.

Owen Matthews

It must have been the summer of 2001, in the rear galley of the Aeroflot red-eye from Moscow to New York. One reads in the Mail that party planes still exist, but these anti-fun days I assume they are uncommon and exclusively private.

Back then Aeroflot’s nightly transatlantic service to JFK was a reliably great party at 30,000 feet, open to all and bring your own bottle. The rear 20 rows of the Airbus 320 were the smoking section, location of all the cool kids on the plane. After the meal service the galley at the back would be tactfully abandoned by the stewardesses to a group of self-selecting revellers, all chatting, smoking, flirting away the night. A blind eye was turned to the supposed ban on consumption of duty-free booze. And just like a terrestrial party, one had to squeeze up to allow people to get to the loo, and occasionally neighbours would complain that we should keep down the racket. Among my fellow passengers on that flight were a pair of excited Moscow prostitutes en route to an exclusive gig in the Big Apple, client tactfully unmentioned. But they had recently returned from Iraq, where they had entertained Uday and Qusay Hussein in a villa outside Tikrit. Both the brothers’ performance and their taste in interiors had disappointed. We drank Bacardi with warm cola. If I recall correctly the girls smoked Vogue Slims; I was still on Parliament Lights. 

Mary Wakefield

When I was 11, I bought a pack of Marlboro Reds from a girl in the sixth form and smoked them on the roof of the school gym. I was determined to seem like a seasoned old chain-smoker – a hot look in those days – so I inhaled one down to the filter then whited out and fell off the roof. From that day on, I was sold.

As a teen in the 90s, romance relied on cigarettes. I’d never have dated a boy for instance who pinched a fag between his thumb and index finger. Those were the sort of wankers who wore Palestinian scarves. But if someone noticed you hadn’t a light and leaned over and held a flame under your unlit fag, or if a boy you were talking to (in the old-fashioned sense) took the cigarette from your lips to light his own…

I just can’t imagine that sharing a vape has the same effect.

Tanya Gold 

The cliché of the ideal cigarette is: it is sexual. The famous image is the scene in Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and gives one to Bette Davis, which indicates she is a woman who has sex. (She also owns hats). My best cigarette was not like this: my lover was not Henreid, but cheap speed. Some drugs belong together: cocaine and champagne. Pork fat and wheat. G-Force and candyfloss. Tobacco loves speed.

Nicotine is not a great drug. The buzz is hot, hollow, earthbound.  I suppose it has to be: you can’t have office smokers having psychotic episodes, or sex. But, taken with speed the night I finished my finals – hell-bound, I guess, in a haunted ballroom – it worked. Perhaps the speed put the nicotine in the bloodstream faster. I don’t know. Maybe Rishi Sunak does. I was cold-eyed, gibbering, and, most importantly, extremely high.  I do not recommend this – what, restaurant? You are a Spectator reader. I recommend medical-grade opiates. 

Nicholas Farrell 

The best cigarette I ever smoked was in the summer of 2022 in Piazza Farnese, Rome, in the bar next to the French Embassy. I had given up cigarettes in 2019 after decades of smoking at least two packs a day had very nearly killed me. A beguiling woman at the next table offered me a cigarette. I accepted. The reason why this was the best cigarette of my life is that I knew, when I stubbed it out, that I was no longer addicted.

In Britain, I always used to smoke Benson and Hedges which came in hard packets that looked like gold ingots. In Italy, I smoked Camel originals in a soft packet. I was quite capable of smoking four packets a day. I got through school without smoking and only started when I worked in France during my year off before university. Smoking killed my mother aged 50 from lung cancer and it nearly killed me. The funny thing is that though I once refused to get on a transatlantic flight because the plane did not have a smoking section, I do not miss it at all. Nor does it bother me when people smoke around me. Booze is quite another matter.

Petronella Wyatt

As an act of chivalry it was without parallel. Back when smoking was still allowed in restaurants, I was dining with my former tutor Earl Russell, a fellow disciple of tobacco whose apple white fingers were seldom without an Egyptian cigarette. The restaurant staff were too distracted to hear my request for an ashtray, and the delicate protuberance at the end of my cigarette was approaching an inch in length. It was then that Russell held out his hand, palm upwards. In that simple gesture, more eloquent than any spoken declaration I have received from a man, was a few hundred years of gallantry and more than a bat squeak of platonic romance. I tapped, and the silver ash descended and dispersed like powder on his skin. The dance of the cigarette has no equal. As Mark Twain once said, if smoking is not allowed in Heaven, I shall not go. 

Toby Young

I smoked between the ages of 14 and 22. My favourite cigarettes were Camel Lights and the first cigarette of the day was always the best, accompanied by a strong cup of coffee. When I went to Harvard as a Fulbright scholar I asked to be housed in the smoking dorm, even though I’d given up by then. I assumed that the girls on the smoking dorm would be more fun, and so it proved to be. I used to dream about smoking for at least 20 years after I gave up. I still miss it today.

Cindy Yu

I’m not really a smoker, but friends know that after the third or fourth drink on particularly jolly nights, I turn into a rapacious hunter/forager for the nearest ciggy (and will make friends and grovel as needed). There’s nothing quite like that first sharp draw to cut through the stupor of alcohol. But for the most part I do it because I think it looks cool. There’s perhaps a part of me, never rebellious enough to go behind the bike shed as a teenager, who wants to make up for lost time.

It does mean that my memories of cigarettes, while happy, tend to be made when I’m already half cut and my footing is not as firm as usual. At a recent work do, the combination of a very strong negroni and a cigarette toppled me right over, and I landed on the gravel of The Spectator’s garden. But instead of finally admitting that I can’t really handle my cigarettes, I blamed the negroni (and the arts editor who mixed it).

Ed West

Without sounding too much like Grandpa Simpson, I still just about remember when you could smoke on planes, although since the last hold-outs were Middle Eastern-based airlines I recall that you couldn’t drink at the same time. I used to live near one of Britain’s last smoking cinemas, and my older cousin used to tell me about the joys of smoking on the top of the bus.

Although there was really nothing better than a cigarette and a pint in a crowded smoky pub, as a nervous flier I used to cherish the first fag after touching down. As time went on I noticed that the smoking areas became less central and less salubrious, until eventually we were put in a little cage in Luton airport, and now the poor smokers have to stand outside of course. But not near the entrance, you scum. 

I’m fatalistic about these good things coming to an end. No one wants to get the Big C and I guess I don’t want my kids to smoke, although there are plenty of other things to be worried about – and now the younger two will never enjoy, as I did, the pleasure of a refreshing Marlboro Light, as we called it back in our day. If they do they’ll have to ask my oldest, who will be one of the youngest people legally able to buy cigarettes in Britain, to go to the shops for them – forever.

Gus Carter

My school friend had just returned from a family holiday and brought with him a brick of Cohiba cigarettes, which he sold off at a fiver a pack. I hate cricket and so had ended up as a ‘wet bob’ by default. One summer afternoon, I took out a single scull from the college boathouse and paddled about a mile down the Thames, pulling up on the riverbank beneath the canopy of a willow tree. Protected from sight, and with the water gurgling past, I opened the gold and black carton, lay back and inhaled. 

Sean Thomas

The best cigarette I ever had was, without question, the first cigarette I had in prison. I was remanded in custody in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, and on my first night in the clink my cellmate handed me a cigarette to calm my nerves. As soon as I inhaled I realised, immediately, why an entire culture surrounds smoking in prisons. There isn’t much to do in jail: smoking is something to do, and the nicotine rush is a form of micro-escape. If Rishi Sunak ever goes to prison he may regret the ban.

Claire Fox

My father, John Fox, died of smoking-related cancer. He was too young at 66. On his death bed some 30 years ago, the family gathered round to share his dying wishes. He said: ‘Claire, promise you will never smoke’ and then paused for effect before continuing ‘… anything stronger than Silk Cut Silver’. My mother yelled out in exasperation: ‘For God’s sake John, I could kill you!’ He noted wryly it was a bit late for that. So, for all these years I have never smoked anything stronger than low tar Silk Cut Silver and I can safely say I have enjoyed every single one. My Dad understood I was a smoker at heart, and I loved him for it. Inevitably, like many at my age, I am now belatedly trying to give up, and have become a demon vaper. But if Rishi goes anywhere near banning disposable vapes, so help me; he can fag right off. Leave my freedom to smoke what I want, to give up when and how I want, alone. It’s called living in a free society.

James Walton

Sad to say, the cigarette I remember most vividly was the first Gitanes I ever had at a café on the Left Bank. Horrible taste (and horrible cliché) of course, but still a big thrill for any self-respecting bookish twentysomething from provincial England.

A smoking experience I much enjoyed sharing was in the mid-1990s when Neil Kinnock had been on a radio quiz show I used to write. I was a fan of his and he was great on the show – so it was a top moment when he bummed a fag from me in the pub afterwards (no going outside back then) with the words ‘Don’t tell Glenys’. Nearly 30 years on, I hope he doesn’t mind that I just have.  

Angus Colwell

Germany doesn’t do most things better, except for cigarettes. A pack is little more than a fiver, and most bars allow smoking inside. Dankeschön. We’d worked up a sweat at work covering Liz Truss’s resignation, and I had a trip to Berlin with friends booked at the end of the week. And someone tried to steal my dog on the morning of the flight, which almost sent me gaga. I landed in Berlin a bit hazy, very late at night, and went straight to a bar in Friedrichshain. I got a drink, and found in the furthest corner – through a smog that was nearly solid – two friends I would probably die for. One supplied a cigarette and the other supplied a lighter. I sat back and did my bit to increase the stink. Heaven.

Jonathan Miller

Players Number 6 behind the bike shed at Bedales. I was 14. My first cigarette was disgusting but also sublime and empowering.  It was strictly forbidden but this made it more alluring.  At our evening assemblies all the pupils shook hands with all the teachers, who would ostentatiously sniff us to detect the whiff of tobacco. But since they all smoked themselves their olfactory sense was blunted. I still sneak the occasional fag at the bottom of the garden but it’s dangerous because Mrs Miller has the nose of a bloodhound. The frisson of rebellion remains.