Telegraph: Boris bites back in age of sale row

The Telegraph reports that the ‘Legal smoking age could rise to 21 after ‘radical’ review’.

The legal age for smoking could be increased to 21 under plans drawn up by order of Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, amid hopes that less than five per cent of Britons will smoke by 2030.

This is not strictly true of course. As Conservative peer Daniel Moylan pointed out after I posted a link to the report on Twitter last night, there is no legal smoking age, merely a legal age of sale of tobacco which is quite different.

That aside, the Telegraph report makes interesting reading. In particular it suggests a battle between Sajid Javid (and therefore the DHSC) and Number Ten:

A Downing Street source indicated that Mr Johnson does not believe the age should be increased because the Government considers 18 to be the age of legal responsibility.

This of course reflects Forest’s thinking. As I wrote in our submission to the ‘independent’ Javed Khan review:

In our view, if you can legally have sex at 16, drive a car and join the army at 17, and purchase alcohol at 18, you should be allowed to make an informed decision buy tobacco at 18. In the eyes of the law you are an adult at 18 and you should therefore be treated like one.

One of the reasons I remain loyal politically to Boris is that I believe he is and always has been liberal and even libertarian at heart, even if he has abandoned the more laissez faire approach to policy-making I used to admire in him before he became Mayor of London.

As I have said before, Boris may not have convinced me he is wholly suited to being PM but having won the 2019 election and got Brexit done he deserves, in my opinion, a full term in office and nothing, not even partygate, has changed my opinion.

During Covid it was clear to me (if not others) that lockdown was anathema to Boris and he imposed restrictions with the greatest reluctance and under enormous pressure from the medical and scientific communities, the media and other parliamentarians.

Frankly I can’t think of a single politician in the UK who could have resisted that pressure.

Some said he acted too hastily and we should have waited, like Sweden. Many more accused him of dithering and said he was responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths. What I saw was a man struggling with his natural instinct not to over-regulate.

With regard to smoking that instinct has kicked in several times over the years. In 2014, for example, he acted quickly - when Mayor of London - to oppose calls to ban smoking in the city’s parks and squares. According to the London Evening Standard:

Amid increasing pressure to adopt proposals from cancer surgeon Lord Darzi calling for the ban [on smoking] in central London, the Mayor refused to back plans to stop people smoking in a "vast open space".

Claiming there was a lack of clinical evidence in the NHS to justify a ban, he said: "There are many other proposals in this report that I think involve less bossiness, less nannying, less finger-wagging than telling people they can't smoke in a vast open space.

I think smoking is a scourge and people should be discouraged from smoking, but actively to ban people from doing something that is legal in a big open space is taking bossiness too far."

OK, the ‘scourge’ comment was a bit unnecessary but I took heart from the fact that Boris seemed to err on the side of encouraging people to quit rather than forcing them via prohibition and other illiberal measures.

My guess is that he stills feels that way but pragmatism (a wish to avoid a long-running political battle) and Sajid Javid’s own ambitions may scupper his desire for a less regulatory approach. We’ll see.

However the decision to abandon - even temporarily - the ban on promotional meal deals is evidence that Boris and his advisors at Number Ten are not stupid. Hopefully they will come to the conclusion that the ‘radical’ recommendations in Javed Khan’s review are equally undesirable (from a liberal Conservative standpoint).

Actually, from what I’ve read, Khan’s proposals aren’t very radical at all. Predictably they are the same policies ASH and co have been lobbying government to introduce so no surprises, at least not yet.

Talking of which the Telegraph also reports that the announcement of Khan’s recommendations has been postponed. They were due to be unveiled at County Hall on Wednesday (May 25), in the presence of chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty no less, but ‘scheduling pressures’ have apparently intervened to push the date back.

I suspect this may have something to do with Sue Gray’s partygate report that is also scheduled to be published midweek but that too may be delayed if some of the people who are set to be named and shamed threaten legal action. What a mess.

Watch this space.

See: Legal smoking age (sic) could rise to 21 after ‘radical’ review (Telegraph)

PS. We heard a rumour yesterday morning that publication of the Khan review had been pushed back but my efforts to get it confirmed proved difficult.

Several calls to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), previously Public Health England, went unanswered.

Even when I was able to ask for a ‘named individual’ the automated system merely went to voicemail and when directed to press ‘0’ to speak to the actual operator (a real live person presumably) another message informed me that ‘the operator is unavailable’.

Of course the operator was unavailable. This was early afternoon so I’m guessing that most of the civil servants at the DHSC and OHID were working from home (if they were working at all) but the absence of a single operator to handle telephone calls is astounding.

Needless to say the message I left on voicemail at the OHID didn’t get a response either. To be fair, though, I never thought it would. If they won’t reply to my emails why would they return a (polite) telephone call?

Muppets.