Give us a break, we need a drink

The need to blow off steam is part of the human genetic make-up

Quite often I read the news and wonder if I am drunk: discovering that Joey from Friends is to present Top Gear, for example, or that Ed Balls has been transformed into a national pin-up after wowing with his muffins on the Great British

Bake Off. “I must be completely hammered,” I think every time somebody says that a man called Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party. “There is no way that I didn’t just dream up that conversation after a day on the Buckfast.” But then I remember I have never drunk Buckfast, and that the man called Jeremy Corbyn is, at the time of going to press, definitely leader of the Labour Party.

Now that Dry January is over and the pubs are filling up like whisky glasses at an Oliver Reed appreciation convention, you might be forgiven for thinking you had drunkenly dreamt up the news that we should think about the risks of cancer before having a glass of wine. But – without wanting to make your hangover any worse – you didn’t. This week of all weeks, when people are falling off wagons on every street corner, Dame Sally Davies told a Commons select committee that thoughts of cancer cross her mind every time she considers having an alcoholic drink.

“Do as I do when I reach for my glass of wine,” the Chief Medical Officer told MPs on Tuesday. “Think, ‘Do I want the glass of wine or do I want to raise my own risk of breast cancer?’ I take a decision each time I have a glass.”

It is becoming abundantly clear that the powers that be are keen to make alcohol seem as socially unacceptable and as dangerous as cigarettes – from Dame Sally’s earlier warning in January that there is no safe level of drinking, to the report this week which found that despite a fall in overall cancer death rates, drink-related cancers are on the rise, with a 60 per cent increase in fatalities from liver cancer in the past 10 years. This is, of course, alarming, and the effects of alcohol on serious drinkers should not be underestimated. But how long before bottles of booze are plastered with pictures of diseased organs and locked behind shutters in supermarkets? Is it only a matter of time before restaurant-goers who want some wine with their meal are banned from ordering more than one glass?

Few people, smokers included, can deny that the ban on public cigarette consumption indoors has been anything other than a good thing. (Figures this week showed a 40 per cent cut in heart attacks since the ban’s introduction in 2007.) But that does not mean we should apply the same model to alcohol. For while booze has the power to destroy livers and lives, it also plays a very important role in society: it serves as an outlet. For every problem drinker or alcoholic, there are scores of people who only enjoy a glass of wine with their dinner, who allow themselves to indulge only once in a while in a blow-out.

Humans have been enjoying alcohol since the Stone Age. Some animals, too – there are tales of elephants feeding from the alcoholic marula tree, and monkeys getting out of it on fermented sugar cane.

The need to blow off steam is part of the human genetic make-up. It is why so many recovering alcoholics and drug addicts become exercise fiends. We baulk at pictures of drunks collapsed on street corners on New Year’s Eve, as if Hogarth wasn’t painting similar scenes back in the 18th century.

Take our beloved booze away at your peril: we all know that the prohibition was a stinking failure, sending crime levels sky high and killing more than 10,000 people who sought out illegally made alcohol that was impure (and blinding many others).

This isn’t me excusing problem drinking – I have written previously about my own troubled relationship with alcohol and am now largely abstemious – and I know that alcohol costs the NHS a huge amount; that many families are destroyed by alcoholism. But it is absurd to imply, as Dame Sally has done, that a simple glass of wine qualifies as problem drinking. Absurd, and dangerous. Because if we take away alcohol, where do people find their release? I shall leave people like Dame Sally to ferment on that. For while it’s nice to think that if you demonise drink everyone will chuck out their bottle-openers and spend their evenings knitting or eating kale or in the gym, it isn’t realistic, and very quickly, I imagine, the Government’s notion of some clean-living utopia will turn into the stuff of nightmares. Let them drink wine, I say. Better the devil you know.