Simon Clark - Taking Liberties

I was delighted to see that David Hockney has joined the chorus of critics denouncing Rishi Sunak’s absurd generational smoking ban.

In a piece published by the Sunday Times (Sunak says smoking kills — but guess what, we’ll all die anyway), Britain’s greatest living artist wrote:

There are too many bossy people in England. It was one of the reasons I started spending more time in Normandy. Bossy people are humourless. This is just madness to me. Why can’t Mr Sunak leave the smokers alone?

What really thrilled me, though, was the confirmation that, 18 years after I invited him to speak at a Forest event at the 2005 Labour party conference in Brighton, he clearly hasn’t forgotten that extraordinary day:

In 2005 I fought to stop the ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants. At the Labour party conference I held up a card saying ‘DEATH awaits you all even if you do smoke’.

For the benefit of new readers, here’s the full story (originally posted in May 2007). To this day it remains the most enjoyable day of my entire working life, a day when almost everything went right and, better still, we had the most enormous fun:

DAVID HOCKNEY first came to our attention as a protagonist in the smoking debate when the New York Times published a letter by him attacking the NYC smoking ban. That was in 2004. A short while later I wrote to him in California, inviting him to attend a private dinner hosted by Forest at Boisdale of Bishopsgate in London. I heard nothing and forgot about it.

However, cometh the day, cometh the man. Halfway through the evening an elderly gentleman with a distinctive white cap and two companions wandered in, sat down, and lit up. It was Hockney, arguably Britain's most famous living artist. Apparently, he had just flown in from Sicily where he had been on holiday. His manager met him at Heathrow, showed him my letter, which had been faxed to London, whereupon he had ordered the cab driver to drive straight to the restaurant.

He didn't say much (he's partially deaf, which is why he's not a huge fan of large public events) but in a phone call the following day he told me the evening had been a "life-enhancing experience" and he was sufficiently inspired to fire off a letter to the Guardian. This in turn led to a feature on Newsnight and, subsequently, a series of interviews on television and radio.

Together, however, our greatest 'success' took place in Brighton at the 2005 Labour party conference. Forest had planned, months in advance, a fringe meeting at the Metropole Hotel where many of the Cabinet were staying. The event, part of our campaign against a public smoking ban, was to be chaired by Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox) and confirmed speakers were Joe Jackson, Antony Worrall Thompson, Sue Carroll of the Daily Mirror, and Sue Brearley, co-author of The Joy of Smoking.

Word came back that Hockney was interested but couldn't commit. Nevertheless we took a chance and printed 3,000 flyers that featured his name. Less than 48 hours before the event, his manager confirmed he would be coming. Cue pandemonium. A team of students was enlisted to distribute the flyers to every corner of the conference. We also issued a press release, announcing his imminent arrival in Brighton.

The BBC were the first to respond. The following morning, shortly before he set off for the south coast, Hockney could be heard, on the Today programme, berating a junior health minister for being "boring" and "dreary". (The London Evening Standard declared it to be the most uplifting moment on radio that year.)

Moments later, on BBC1's breakfast programme, he was interviewed again - live from his London studio - with homemade posters either side of him declaring 'Death comes to us all'.

The Guardian, meanwhile, reported that:

The celebrity smoker David Hockney is a surprise visitor [to conference] today. The artist will join the tobacco campaign group Forest at a fringe meeting to denounce the government's crackdown on smoking in pubs.

Down in Brighton we were besieged by journalists wanting to interview the great man. In rapid order, we arranged one-to-one interviews with The Times, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph and the Press Association. We also got him on Andrew Neil's The Daily Politics, which was broadcasting live from the conference centre.

But first there was the little matter of a photo call at the Hilton that got completely out of hand when Stuart Holmes, a well-known anti-smoking campaigner, was encouraged (by a rogue photographer) to butt in, prompting security staff to wrestle him out of the building via a fire exit while 30 or more cameras clicked and flashed in unison. Throughout it all, David Hockney smiled benignly and exuded an air of amused detachment.

That evening, after a packed event full of laughter (it was described as "one of the best fringe meetings for years"), we took David and our other speakers for dinner at Brighton's Havana restaurant. The Sunday Times came too, columnist Jasper Gerard having been sent from London with the specific task of interviewing Hockney for the paper's Review section.

Later that night, as we walked along the promenade to our hotel (without David who had returned to London after dinner), we got caught in the most torrential downpour. It was one o'clock in the morning and the rain was bouncing off the pavement. We were exhausted, and soaking wet. But we were also exhilarated, and I will never, EVER, forget it.