Rishi’s smoking ban inspired me to light a cigarette

00:00 04:51

Kate Andrews has narrated this article for you to listen to.

What has Rishi Sunak’s government achieved in its first year? The highlights include a renegotiated Brexit policy and setting more practical net-zero deadlines. But Sunak asked the country to judge him on his ability to deliver his pledges set out at the start of the year. If polls are to be believed, voters are preparing to do just that. Inflation is falling, but that’s largely due to interest rate hikes announced by the Bank of England. The economy is growing, but barely. The NHS waiting list keeps rising – 7.6 million now in England alone. On this last point, no doubt the six-figure salaried consultants who keep striking deserve part of the blame. But to say the Sunak government is struggling to make good on its promises would be putting it rather gently.

Still, it occurs to me that there is a more recent policy proposal that is already having an effect, certainly on my life, though perhaps not in the way the government intended. It’s thanks to Sunak’s latest plan to ban smoking for future generations that I had a cigarette for the first time in almost ten years.

Successive Tory governments have worked hard to come up with ways to make life less affordable and less fun

It was not a decision I made lightly. I’ve never been a smoker. The few puffs on cigarettes I tried as a teenager left me dizzy and uninterested. On the evening of my 24th birthday, I decided that I wasn’t much of a libertarian if I didn’t give smoking a proper go. It wasn’t my brightest idea. Still, I tried. Five cigarettes made me violently sick for the next two days.

I don’t know why I thought this experiment would end well.