From the archive: Auberon Waugh’s Smoker’s Diary

July 1999, London: Auberon Waugh at the Academy Club in Lexington Street, Soho, where Forest 'sponsored' a monthly party for 'contributors and other literary folk'

The second edition of Forest's Free Choice magazine was published in September 1999.

It featured an interview with Forest's new patron, TV chef and restaurateur Antony Worrall Thompson, who told us that smoking had never been a problem in his restaurants:

"Generally, if you smoke nowadays, you think of the person next to you and say, 'Do you mind if I smoke?' or, if you see people are on their main course, you wait until they're finished and then light up. Most people are quite reasonable about it."

Pubs and bars, he added, should remain unregulated as far as smoking was concerned.

"A bar is a smoky environment. It's where people go to have a smoke but if you have a pub which has a restaurant then it should come under the restaurant ruling."

The same issue also featured an interview with Clive Bates, director of ASH. I got on OK with Clive, although he declined several offers of lunch.

He did however agree to answer questions for the 'What's Your Vice?' feature in Free Choice. For example:

Hello, what's your vice?
Belgian beer

Why Belgian beer?
Tasty, strong, idiosyncratic.

Do you drink at work or is it a private vice?
Demands of work leave little scope for performance impairing drug use. As we daily face about six tobacco industry front groups, plus numerous barmy fellow travellers, we do need to be on the ball.

And so on. You get the picture.

Perhaps my proudest boast is that I persuaded Auberon Waugh to contribute a piece for our 'Smoker's Diary' column.

To put this in perspective, in my teens and early twenties I was a big fan of Waugh’s columns in Private Eye and The Spectator so it was a huge thrill to not only meet him but get an article from the great man.

Until now it has not been published anywhere else but, 22 years later, I thought you might like to read it:

Smoker's Diary – Auberon Waugh

I was reading Nicholas Farrell's 'Smokers' Diary' in the summer issue of Free Choice when some austere thoughts occurred to me. Farrell was boasting about how he paid only £1.50 a pack for his Camel. This was because he lives in Italy, lucky devil, where smokes are infinitely cheaper. He predicted that the single market throughout the European Union would produce higher prices in Europe, rather than lower prices in Britain, because all politicians are frantic for more money to spend on their own ridiculous and self-important purposes.

In my experience as a smoker, the price of a single cigarette has risen from under 1p to 20p – more than the cost of a packet of cigarettes as a young man. The increase, says Farrell, is not because the British government cares about people's health but because it wants the cash.

This is obviously true, and is proved by the fact that Chancellors of the Exchequer in the good old days measured duty increases by the amount they reckoned they could get away with before people stopped buying cigarettes, or wine, or whisky, or whatever.

What Farrell omitted to mention is that nowadays we have a seriously goody-goody prime minister [Tony Blair] who actually wishes to stop people from smoking. His proposed ban on cigarette advertising, which will not bring the Revenue an extra penny, is designed, he says, to discourage children or 'kids' from taking up the habit.

How many 'kids' does he suppose read the Literary Review, of which I have been editor for the last 13 years? The only thing which gives it anything approaching commercial respectability is the tobacco advertising from such enlightened patrons as BAT, Gallaher and a few others. Forest, God bless them, even pay for our monthly party for contributors and other literary folk. The magazine will almost certainly have to close. Is that a useful thing for Tony Blair to have achieved?

IT IS OBSERVABLE how politicians of every sex and persuasion always bring in some reference to 'the kids' when they wish to impress us with their sincerity. I imagine a special race of politician 'kids' who never smoke, never drink except in extreme moderation, and concern themselves only with charitable activities.

That is the idea, at any rate. In point of fact an amazingly high proportion of MPs' children end up going to the bad, as criminals, idlers and social parasites. One pities them, of course. If only the little darlings had been allowed the occasional cigarette when they wanted one.

THE REASON our fellow Europeans are unlikely to increase their tobacco duty to within hailing distance of the British model is that they have a noisy and outspoken range of public opinion which will not let them get away with it. It is only in Britain that we defer, by nature, to the self-appointed goody-goodies, telling us it is in our own best interests not to smoke.

Since Mr Hague appointed Gary Streeter as his shadow environmental secretary, it is plain that Britons have no democratic choice in the matter of smoking. Streeter not only supports restrictions on advertising, but also demanded, in a letter to the chief executive of BAT, that they should be extended to foreign countries.

Perhaps Free Choice is an unsuitable forum for urging my fellow countrymen to bloody revolution. But somebody has got to do it, somewhere.

Waugh died, aged 61, just over a year later.

He had suffered for much of his adult life from the effects of an accident while on national service in Cyprus. According to his obituary in the Telegraph:

Trying to unjam the Browning machine-gun in his armoured car, he managed to set it off and to fire, at point-blank range, four bullets through his chest and shoulder, one through his arm and one through his left hand before he noticed what was happening "and got out of the way pretty quick".

Horribly injured, he was still alert enough to say "Kiss me, Chudleigh" to his troop sergeant, on whom the allusion was lost and who treated him afterwards with suspicion. "To those who suffer from anxieties about being shot," Waugh later wrote, "I can give the reassuring news that it is almost completely painless."

He lost a lung, his spleen, several ribs and a finger. His survival was miraculous; and for the rest of his life he was often in pain (the chest wounds required disagreeable treatment from time to time) and was conscious of the closeness of death. But he always made light of his physical troubles.

Following his death I was quoted by the Guardian:

"Bron was an inspiration to us. He was a great example of tolerance and common sense. We will greatly miss his friendship and support."

To be honest I felt awkward calling him ‘Bron’ because I barely knew him personally but anything else felt too formal.

It seems however that our affection for him was reciprocated because after his funeral on January 24, 2001, the Telegraph noted:

At the end of the service a retiring collection was taken for the Howard League for Penal Reform, one of Waugh's favourite charities, although his family said that they had considered giving it to Forest, the pro-smoking organisation which the satirist had long supported.

You can imagine too how pleased I was when his son Alexander sent us a message which we read out at Forest’s 40th anniversary dinner in 2019.

Wishing your organisation all happiness and prosperity and ultimate success against the tyrannies of nanny stateism. With all warmest salutations for your 40th anniversary! Vivat Forest!