Never heard of Lord Laird? Read on ...

The Sunday papers ... where to start?

It's difficult to get past the Mail on Sunday's front page headline (No 10 rocked by secret love affair) without wanting to know more, but even on Twitter no-one is daring to name names, with or without the addition of 'innocent face'.

We'll just have to wait for more details to emerge.

Meanwhile other papers are reporting that a number of peers have been caught up in the 'cash for questions' row. One of them is Lord Laird who has featured a couple of times on this blog.

In October 2008 I described him as a "persistent anti-smoking activist" after he tabled a question in the House of Lords asking the Government what proposals they had to ban smoking in all enclosed places (my emphasis) where children are present.

In August 2010, following a debate on BBC Radio Ulster in which I went head-to-head with him, I wrote:

Despite stiff competition, I can't think of a single peer who is more anti-smoking than Lord Laird. You could almost describe it as an illness.

I went on to publish the full discussion between Lord Laird and Lord Harris (who was Forest chairman from 1987 until his death in 2006).

The meeting took place in a small room at the House of Lords and with Lord Laird's consent we published the transcript on No Smoking Day 2003.

Even then he was way ahead of ASH and co. Ten years ago Lord Laird wanted to ban smoking in any public place, indoors or outdoors.

But his views went far beyond that. For example:

"How can people operate to the maximum of their ability when they're continually working out little ploys and plots to get outside for a tobacco break? I've been in organisations where the whole strategy is to get outside to smoke. Outside I see a lot of people smoking and on the ground is a whole series of cigarette butts which is very sad.

"And speaking as a male, there is nothing more horrible than to see an attractive female smoking a fag. I'll tell you an oxymoron: an attractive female smoker. How can you have a girl go to all the trouble to put on nice perfume and then smell like a stale ashtray? That's social exclusion.

Like Ireland's health minister James Reilly, who I wrote about a couple of days ago, Lord Laird's anti-smoking crusade appears to be driven by personal experience. As he told Lord Harris:

"I lost my own father, aged 63, through a smoking-related illness. I also lost an uncle, although he was in his eighties, through a long, slow, cancerous death, and three years ago my wife lost her best friend, a small blonde 51-year-old, to a smoking-related illness."

Read the transcript here. It's a fascinating insight into the mind of an extreme anti-smoker: Peer pressure: what Lord Laird thinks about smokers.

Curiously, my 2008 post concluded:

Believe me, Lord Laird is no fool. But he is driven by a sense of righteousness that, in my view, could be his (and the anti-smoking movement's) Achilles heel. I want to hear more, not less, from people like him because I am convinced that, eventually, they will shoot themselves in the foot.

Update: 'Lord Laird has resigned the Ulster Unionist Party whip following lobbying claims' (Sky News).