So will Angela give up cigarettes – or politics?

SO NOW we know what I did not realise before. Angela Rayner, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, smokes cigarettes.

‘So what?’ you might say. Many people smoke. Well, so quite a lot. Because Ms Rayner has been

one of the political class who joined in a solid bloc to lecture us about our health, and protecting the NHS. I believe pictures also exist of a smoking Michael Gove, Minister for Concreting Over The Country.

Wear masks, they said. Stay at home, they said. Their belief that public health and the NHS were the overriding concern of government closed businesses, wrecked educations and, as we are slowly learning, wounded the economy very deeply indeed. We were, in short, asked to make major longterm sacrifices for the general good, involving self-restraint.

No sentient being in this country does not realise by now that cigarettes are bad for you, may well kill you and are almost certain to subject you to very severe chronic disease. Can you smoke and ‘support our NHS’? Not really. I don’t think that you can smoke and support policies which ask others to make sacrifices you aren’t prepared to make.

I think Ms Rayner and Mr Gove know this too. That is why such pictures are very rare. Harold Wilson (who actually preferred cigars) smoked a pipe in public in the 1960s. So did Tony Benn. More recently than that, Kenneth Clarke was often seen with a cigar. Even Neil Kinnock had a public pipe-smoking phase.

But as governments interfered more and more with our private lives, our leaders began to keep their dirty habits secret. There are few, if any, genuine pictures of Barack Obama, once a keen smoker, actually smoking. And David Cameron was not outed until after he left office. They knew, you see, that modern Left-wing policies and smoking just don’t go together. I agree with them. I’ll leave it to them to decide which one to give up.