According to a study led by UCL researchers, 'Most smokers wrongly believe vaping is at least as harmful as smoking'.
The UCL press release was embargoed until 4.00pm this afternoon and is getting quite a lot of coverage.
Yesterday I was invited by BBC News (online) to respond to the study so I sent this comment:
“Government is partly to blame for the confusion because banning disposable vapes and threatening to severely restrict the display and packaging of e-cigarettes is hardly the best way to promote a reduced risk product that has helped millions of smokers to quit.
“Furthermore, is it any wonder that smokers are confused about the perceived risk of vaping when the message coming from government and the public health industry is that the only people who should vape are adults who want to quit smoking, and no-one should vape long-term or recreationally.”
Vice started as a punk magazine called the Voice of Montreal in 1994 before it moved to New York, retaining its reputation as an edgy and often provocative publisher, with editions worldwide. It later branched out into news, audio and television.
Last year, however, the company filed for bankruptcy and was sold for $350 million having been valued ‘at about $5.7 billion’ in 2017.
I have no interest in Vice (I was too old, even when it was launched, to be part of the target audience), but our paths did cross once or twice.
In 2016 a Forest fringe event at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham was featured in an article that gave it a surprisingly positive review:
What the party was like: Actually really good. An upper-middle market bar packed to the gills with free booze, mini burgers, pocket ash-trays (a weird plastic wallet thing you can carry around) inscribed with the words, "Say no to outdoor smoking bans," and leaflets about how "A once benign nanny state has become a bully state, coercing rather than educating adults to give up tobacco."
Entertainment: It was advertised as "Eat. Drink. Smoke. Vape.", so like all good parties there were no frills beyond the amount of inebriants you could stuff in your body.
A few years later we were contacted by another Vice journalist and I spent two hours being interviewed for an article that was never published.
I was subsequently approached by a ‘casting producer’ who wanted to interview me for a subsidiary Vice project and nothing came of that either, but I wasn’t surprised because it was clear by then that the former ‘punk magazine’ was fully on board the anti-smoking juggernaut and any views that opposed the Establishment-led orthodoxy on tobacco had no place in the world of Vice.
(Oh, the irony.)
The most obvious example of Vice abandoning its punk origins was the launch in April 2019 of a £5 million ‘Quit Cigarettes’ initiative funded by the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI), whose goal is a smoke-free (sic) world.
Featuring some of the most puerile articles I have ever read on any subject, headlines included:
How Smoking Increases Chances of Genital Warts
This Is How Smoking Makes Your Penis Shrink
How Smoking is Ruining Your Sex Life
Is Smoking a Deal-Breaker on Tinder?
Are Festivals Doing Enough to Phase Out Smoking?
How Cigarettes Blight British Seaside Towns
Why It’s Time to Ban Smoking in Airports For Good
Are You Being Bullied Into Smoking Cigarettes?
As I wrote here, the project ‘seemed determined to belittle smokers and their habit and was so tedious I eventually stopped visiting the site because I couldn’t imagine that anyone would take it seriously’.
To this day I would love to know how PMI execs justified the expense, but this is a company that also threw hundreds of thousands of dollars the way of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (before parting ways last year), so I guess £5 million was small change.
As for Vice, in 2016, when she was 19, my daughter offered this damning appraisal:
"It's written by a bunch of pathetic twenty somethings who hate anyone who doesn't agree with their uni politics.
"They pass their bitterness off as sarcastic humour. I much prefer Dazed and Confused if you're gonna read that stuff."
Visiting the Byre Theatre in St Andrews last week brought back a lot of memories.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I was in two school productions at the Byre, The Taming of the Shrew in 1974, and Our Town (by Thornton Wilder) in 1976.
In The Taming of the Shrew I played Lucentio who is ‘struck by love for Bianca at first sight’.
To be honest, I wasn’t a good actor and it didn’t help that I had to share the stage with Ron Porter, who was in Year 6, two years above me.
Ron played Petruchio and according to a review in the local paper:
Ron Porter’s affability shines out like the proverbial beacon ... as the most experienced member of the cast, he has the confidence to be able to establish an immediate rapport with the audience. ... [He] turned in his usual high standard of performance as the enormously arrogant Petruchio.
I didn’t even merit a mention but I console myself with the thought that, 50 years later, Ron is still enjoying a successful acting career under the name Ron Donachie.
We returned to the Byre for Our Town in January 1976. I played George Gibbs, a schoolboy who was falling for Emily, who lived across the street in a small provincial town in America, circa 1910.
As written by Thornton Wilder (in 1938), Our Town requires very few props and one of the props we employed was a step ladder.
For much of the play I sat on the top step which I think was supposed to represent George staring out of his bedroom window at Emily’s house, while George’s younger sister sat on a lower step giving him/me the benefit of her ‘advice’.
Well, that’s how I remember it. Either way, we spent what felt like a great many hours on that ladder in rehearsal prior to our three night run, so I can truly say we suffered for our art.
(Spoiler alert: George marries Emily who dies in childbirth in act 3, so not a happy ending, but it was a very happy production that I remember with great fondness.)
Between Shakespeare and Thornton Wilder I was in Charley’s Aunt, a Victorian farce that became a global success after it was first performed in Bury St Edmunds in 1892. Our production took place in school, in the assembly hall.
The weirdest production by far, though, was a series of short one act plays that we performed after our final exams in 1976.
The one I was in featured a young couple and their ‘dead’ baby and was set in a graveyard.
I played the man and a week before the performance the director took us to rehearse among the gravestones that sit alongside the ruins of St Andrews Cathedral.
At his insistence, the performance also featured my first (and last) on stage snog which might have been unremarkable had it not been for the location (a graveyard) and the ‘dead’ baby. Either way, it prompted several members of the audience to walk out.
Realising my acute limitations as an actor, I steered clear of the drama society at university and took part in just one play, an English Department production of a ‘domestic burletta’ first performed in 1826 that made a virtue of loud, overwrought acting with no need for nuance or subtlety.
Luke the Labourer did however enable me to share a stage, albeit very briefly, with the extremely talented Bill Anderson who went on to enjoy a stellar career as a writer and director in theatre and television.
Apart from an absurd student union pantomime, that was the last time I ‘acted’ on stage and the part I played was a far cry from my stage debut at Winbury School in Maidenhead in 1968.
Winbury was a small independent prep school and, if I remember, the school hall was an old Nissan hut that doubled up as the dining hall where we had lunch.
There was a stage at one end and because it was an all boys’ school someone had to play the girl and that someone was me.
According to my mother, the headmaster complimented me on how attractive I looked, which is probably the best review I ever got.
And the name of the play? Queer Street.
Update: I have found a cutting – a review of Luke the Labourer, no less – from the Aberdeen Press & Journal. Here's a snippet:
Last night, after the interval, the show took on a life and vigour that had been lacking earlier and although the players generally entered into the spirit of the piece, their enthusiasm ran away with them on occasion, when firmer discipline and less inclination to find the situation comic themselves might have paid dividends.
Below: Yours truly playing Farmer Wakefield and taking it very seriously.
Just back from a short break in St Andrews with my wife and my mother.
Although I visit St Andrews several times a year - usually after watching football in Dundee - this is only the second time my mother has been back to Fife since my parents returned to England in the late Seventies.
From 1969 to 1978 we lived in Wormit, a village that overlooks Dundee and the River Tay, and for six of those years (1970-1976) I went to school in St Andrews, twelve miles away.
From 1967 to 2021 Madras College was split across two campuses that were a mile-and-a-half apart.
The original building, in the centre of town, dates back to 1832, when the school was founded, and this week we stayed in an apartment in the old schoolhouse (above) that was once the home of the headmaster (or rector) and was built the same year.
In 2021 the school moved to a new £50 million campus on the edge of town and the original South Street site, with its Grade II listed building, has been bought by the university and is being redeveloped before its eventual unveiling as ‘New College’.
Anyway, on Tuesday morning we walked around the ruins of St Andrews Castle, which overlooks the sea and is home of the famous bottle dungeon, ‘one of medieval Britain's most infamous castle prisons’.
By coincidence, one of the guides was a former physics teacher at Madras, albeit long after I was there, and I was able to tell him about my physics teacher, a charismatic Cambridge graduate who ran off with the young French teacher (who really was French) and neither was seen or heard of again.
We then drove down the coast to Anstruther, a small fishing village I have written about many times, where we had lunch in the award-winning Anstruther Fish Bar, before returning to St Andrews to see a student production of Dr Faustus at the local Byre Theatre.
This was another trip down memory lane because I was in several school productions at the Byre including Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew (Easter 1974) and Our Town (January 1976), a three-act play written by American playwright Thornton Wilder in 1938.
(Of all the plays I was in at school and university, Our Town was probably my favourite, although you’d have to forgive my comically awful American accent.)
In the summer of 1976 I was also a body double in a professional production performed by the Byre’s resident company.
Sadly I can’t remember much about it apart from the fact that, late in the play, I had to fall out of a cupboard at the back of the stage whereupon the lights went out and I had to scramble off in the dark amid laughter and applause.
Founded in 1933 on the site of an old cow byre, the current building - opened in 2001 - is the third to be built since then (the building I performed in was the second) but the company that owned it went into administration a decade ago and the theatre is now run by the university.
I’m not sure that Dr Faustus (an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlow) would be high on my list of must sees, but it was entertaining enough, and a small but enthusiastic audience (mostly students) seemed to enjoy it.
Finally, a shout out to Haar, an award-winning restaurant where we had dinner on Wednesday.
Named after the thick sea mist that is common in St Andrews (and Wormit), Haar is on the same site as The Niblick, the first bar I ever bought a drink in, aged 15. The second was The Castle pub in North Street, a five minute walk from The Niblick.
Neither exists today (The Castle is now a private residence) but at least the old Niblick building is in good hands. Warmly recommended, should you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods.
PS. I don’t remember this but, according to Wikipedia, act one of Our Town ends with the Stage Manager (one of the leading characters) telling the audience:
"That's the end of Act I, folks. You can go and smoke, now. Those that smoke."
The anti-smoking group ASH last week announced the imminent retirement of their long-serving chief executive.
Deborah Arnott (above right) will leave her job, which she has held since 2003, on September 30th.
I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I half predicted it a year ago when I 'celebrated' the 20th anniversary of her reign by writing:
Deborah Arnott was 48 when she replaced Clive [Bates] as director of ASH … I'm not being ageist (I'm 64 myself!) but it does beg the question: could retirement be looming for this long-serving titan of tobacco control?
Last week’s announcement included tributes from some of Arnott’s allies in parliament and the public health industry, and it would be churlish of me to deny her ‘successes’, even though I fundamentally oppose much of what she, and ASH, represent.
Like it or not, she has been a tireless campaigner, even if some of her achievements have been slightly exaggerated.
Take the smoking ban. They say history is written by the victors and nowhere is this more apparent than in the infamous article that she and her sidekick, the late Ian Willmore, wrote for the Guardian after MPs voted for the legislation in England in 2006.
It was a remarkably self-congratulatory piece and I remember wondering what her fellow anti-smoking campaigners felt about them taking so much of the credit.
‘Smoke and Mirrors’ did however introduce us to two interesting concepts - the ‘swarm effect’ and the ‘confidence trick’.
According to Arnott and Willmore, they had some doubts that a comprehensive smoking ban would get through Parliament.
The ‘trick’ was to appear confident that the Bill would pass because by doing so they would win the support of politicians who want to be on the winning side.
The ‘swarm effect’ referred to the creation of a coalition of allies, an idea we took on board and adopted for our campaign against plain packaging a few years later.
For many years Deborah and I often went head-to-head on television and radio and I would be lying if I said I enjoyed it because, in person, she had an annoying habit of lecturing me even before the interview had begun.
I might be sitting quietly in the green room reading a paper and Deborah would arrive and start chiding me even before we went on air!
I don't recall any small talk, ever, but I had no problem with her in general. On one occasion I actually had reason to be grateful to her.
It was November 2009 and we were on the Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV which was recorded as live on Wednesday and broadcast on Friday at 3.00pm.
The subject that particular week was the tobacco display ban which the then Labour government wanted to introduce.
There were four guests on the show and three of them - Deborah, Kelvin Mackenzie (former editor of The Sun), and another journalist, the fiercely anti-smoking Jaci Stephens - were in favour of the ban, so I was outnumbered three-to-one.
After the show, which was recorded in front of a live audience, I complained to Titchmarsh whose reaction was a little defensive.
Deborah overheard and ran after me to say she agreed with me - a first! It was a small gesture but one that I appreciated.
Sadly, it hasn’t always been like that. The nadir of our professional ‘relationship’ was probably ten years ago.
It was odd because Deborah should have been in a celebratory mood. It was a Monday night and MPs had just voted for a ban on smoking in cars carrying children.
We were booked to do an interview on the BBC News channel at Millbank studios in Westminster, just across the road from the Houses of Parliament, and what happened when she arrived took me by surprise.
“The people have spoken ... MPs have voted ... It's a victory for democracy ... You've lost ... Forest should shut up shop,” she told me, and this was off air!
Her bitterness towards Forest seemed to cloud any personal or professional satisfaction she must have felt about the vote, and when the interview finished she marched off without another word to me.
In 2011 I had asked ‘What’s become of ASH?’. Following the incident above, I went further and asked: ‘What does ASH do that justifies its continued existence?’
Looking back I made a pretty strong case, I think, but here’s the thing. That year (2014) marked a turning point for ASH, which I felt was running out of steam.
Indeed, Deborah Arnott’s greatest achievement in the past decade has arguably been the reinvention of ASH as an advocate of e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation tool, and it all began following the first E-Cigarette Summit in London in November 2013 when her ambivalence bordering on hostility towards vaping contrasted sharply with that of her predecessor Clive Bates.
Had she continued to be hostile to e-cigarettes ASH might have slipped into irrelevance.
Whether she recognised the danger I don’t know, but it was noticeable that over the next few years ASH not only became far more positive about e-cigarettes, but the go to authority whose research on the prevalence of vaping is quoted by everyone from government to a grateful vaping industry.
Arnott herself has became a permanent fixture at the E-Cigarette Summit on both sides of the Atlantic, frequently quoted by vaping advocates despite the fact that her vision is a future in which all forms of recreational nicotine have been eradicated and no-one smokes or vapes.
In recent years our paths have crossed less frequently. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we were in the same TV or radio studio together.
This is due partly to Covid, but also the changing nature of broadcasting. Today many interviews are conducted online and while it would be stretching things to say I miss our ‘head-to-heads’ in the studio, life is certainly a little duller without them.
So, what next for the outgoing CEO of ASH? As readers know I have been playfully lobbying for her and her counterpart in Scotland, Sheila Duffy, to be honoured in recognition of their services to the nanny state.
With a Conservative prime minister now driving that train, the time has surely come for them to be rewarded with an MBE or OBE.
But why stop there? Some people are even speculating that Deborah will be given a peerage, allowing her to continue her anti-smoking crusade in Parliament.
Meanwhile, this is how her retirement is being spun:
Before Deborah retires, parliament is expected to have passed revolutionary laws to create a smokefree generation; a fitting end to two decades of campaigning success.
But wait … when did ASH ever lobby the Government for a generational tobacco sales ban?
Raising the age of sale from 18 to 21 was the objective, not a generational ban. In fact, when plans to ban the sale of tobacco to future generations of adults were announced in New Zealand in 2021, ASH was noticeably lukewarm about the policy.
Likewise, until very recently, and unlike their counterparts in Scotland, ASH UK was opposed to banning disposable vapes. Since the Government announced plans to do just that, however, I don’t recall hearing a single word of protest from Deborah or her colleagues.
This chameleon-like quality to adapt to circumstances and abandon previous held positions is impressive, although it reeks (to me) of bare-faced opportunism.
Nevertheless, if all goes to plan over the next few weeks, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill will sail through Parliament, Rishi Sunak will have his legacy, and Deborah can walk off into the sunset, job done.
But is it?
Truth is, the holy grail for Deborah this past decade was not a generational ban, or even achieving smoke free status in England by 2030, but the introduction of a tobacco levy that would have forced the tobacco companies to fork out billions of pounds over many years, effectively funding the anti-smoking industry for decades to come.
That, I believe, is the real legacy Deborah hoped to secure before she retired, and unless Jeremy Hunt does a remarkable u-turn in the Budget next month (the Treasury has always opposed a tobacco levy), she will leave ASH with one of her principal goals unfulfilled.
As for her successor, one would imagine that Hazel Cheeseman, her deputy since 2021, is the hot favourite. Last year, having speculated that Arnott might retire, I wrote:
I’ve no reason to suppose Arnott's retirement is imminent, but it didn't go unnoticed that in 2021 Hazel Cheeseman stepped up from director of policy to deputy chief executive.
I may be wrong but I don’t recall ASH ever having a deputy CEO (or deputy director) before, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she is being lined up for the top job when Deborah does call it a day.
I still expect Hazel Cheeseman to be appointed but there has to be a recruitment process so it’s not impossible she could be pipped at the post by an external candidate. We’ll see.
Finally, I do want to pay a tribute (of sorts) to the outgoing CEO.
While ASH represents everything that’s wrong with a public health industry that puts regulation and coercion ahead of education and individual freedom, I recognise a committed and successful campaigner even if I don’t agree with the campaign.
I accept too that Deborah Arnott, an ex-smoker, is genuine in her belief that the world will be a better place without smoking or tobacco.
Of course I refute that because my experience tells me that, despite the health risks, a great many people enjoy smoking and a life without any risk is a poor substitute for living.
We must therefore agree to disagree.
Unfortunately, most tobacco control campaigners refuse to acknowledge that people like me hold views that are just as strong as theirs and, instead of respecting our differences, they insist we must be stooges of Big Tobacco.
Ringing in my ears, for example, is the repeated implication that people like me are driven not by principle but by money.
In 2010 Deborah told one interviewer:
“Well, to start with, Simon forgets to mention that his organisation is funded by the tobacco industry so his salary is paid out of their profits.”
In 2022 she was still banging the same drum:
“Well, first of all what Simon doesn't tell you is that he is a non-smoker, that he has made a very good living for over 20 years from being paid by the tobacco industry …”
I could of course have replied that Deborah Arnott has made an equally good living out of tobacco (control), earning significantly more than me, but I’m not that petty.
Also, I prefer to play the ball not the man.
That said, I bear her no ill will, so enjoy your retirement, Deborah. You’ve (cough) deserved it.
Given all the storms in recent weeks I was a bit trepidatious when I booked my flights a few weeks ago, but all was well.
Both the outbound and inbound flights were fine, which hasn’t always been the case when flying to Ireland.
I had several meetings arranged, mostly business, but they all involved eating and drinking.
The one non-business meeting was with my old friend Bill who lives near Greystones, which is south of Dublin but the last stop on the Dart railway so it’s very easy to get to, albeit a 50 minute journey from the centre of the city where I was staying.
I first met Bill at Wormit Primary School in Scotland in 1969 and we’ve been friends ever since.
During the summer holidays we camped (and later hiked) in a number of places, most notably Pitlochry and the Lake District.
Our ten-day cycling tour of central Scotland in 1975 didn’t go according to plan because of the ferocious wind and rain, but we stayed in some interesting youth hostels, notably Loch Lomond which was more like a castle and had its own library, and one or two whose facilities were, how shall I say, a tad primitive.
In 1992, after I got married, we spent part of our honeymoon with Bill and his wife Patty (who had married shortly before us) in the Cayman Islands where he was working as a corporate lawyer following spells in Hong Kong and Bermuda (or was it the Bahamas?).
Twenty-five years ago they moved to Ireland, where Patty’s family lives, and since I started travelling regularly to Dublin on business (circa 2003) I have become a frequent visitor to Greystones.
Our normal routine is to meet for a drink in the Hungry Monk, a French wine bar and restaurant opposite the station, then walk to another restaurant just around the corner.
Chakra by Jaipur, founded in 2005, is a wonderful Indian restaurant with fabulous food several levels above your standard Indian menu.
Since we were last there it has been awarded a Michelin star (in 2023), but in recent years it has been joined by a new Indian/Pakistani restaurant called Daata, which is where we went on Monday night.
There are two Daata restaurants, one in Bray, up the road, the other in Greystones. A few weeks ago Gordon Ramsay and his team, who were in Ireland filming, dropped in to the Bray restaurant for dinner and word quickly spread.
Thankfully it was open when we went because many local restaurants are no longer open on Monday or even Tuesday nights. Even the wine bar at the Hungry Monk was shut so we had a drink in The Burnaby, a nearby pub.
Neither The Burnaby nor Daata were busy so it does make you wonder how long they can stay open every night.
It’s a problem that’s not restricted to Greystones or Ireland.
The day before I flew to Dublin I took my wife for Sunday lunch at one of her favourite restaurants outside Cambridge where opening times have been cut to just four days a week (Thursday to Sunday).
Given all the overheads that can’t be substantially reduced (rent, rates etc), is that a sustainable business model? I don’t know, but there’s clearly a post Covid problem in the hospitality sector and how it resolves itself remains to be seen.
Far busier than Daata on Monday night was Balfes, a bistro in the centre of Dublin, where I had a working lunch on Tuesday with three colleagues.
In the evening, though, it was back to another sparsely populated bar, this time in Malahide, north of Dublin, where I met Keith Redmond, a practising dentist and former councillor.
The last time I saw Keith he was compering Forest’s Farewell to Freedom dinner in Dublin in 2018.
Venue was Suesey Street, a ‘contemporary Irish restaurant’ whose major selling point (for us at least) was the magnificent outdoor area where guests could drink, smoke, and eat canapés before dinner in the main restaurant.
It had a real fire at one end and could be almost completely enclosed by awnings if it was raining or bitterly cold.
Sadly, since we were last there, smoking has been prohibited even in the outdoor area so we wouldn’t go back even if we were to revive the Farewell to Freedom dinner.
At the same time the Hibernia Forum, the free market think tank with whom we co-hosted two Farewell to Freedom Dinners and a series of private dinners with various guest speakers from the UK, has also died a death.
Whether the more aggressive ‘right wing’ movement that has popped up in Ireland in recent years will step in and defend smokers’ rights remains to be seen.
At present (and I speak cautiously because I’ve only been following it intermittently and from afar) it seems focussed primarily on Ireland’s culture wars (and immigration).
On Tuesday however the Irish Times published a letter from ASH Ireland urging the government to follow the UK’s example and introduce a generational smoking ban, so the threat is clearly imminent and those who claim to support individual freedom need to speak out, regardless of the issue.
Once the UK has passed legislation, setting a precedent for a generational ban, other governments will undoubtedly consider and then propose a very similar policy.
This isn’t rocket science. Remember the process that led to the ban on smoking in all enclosed public places in the UK?
It wasn’t a British politician or prime minister who came up with the idea. It was a policy first copied by the Scottish Executive, and then adopted by the rest of the UK, from a blueprint created in Dublin.
Thanks, Ireland, and in return here’s a policy copied by the UK from legislation devised (albeit later rejected) in New Zealand.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I attended the launch of the new grassroots campaign, Popular Conservatism, last week.
I went because I read a report in the Sunday Times the previous weekend and was curious to see what the fuss was about.
We were told that one thousand people had applied to attend the launch, but the Upper Hall at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster could only accommodate 250 so I guess I was one of the lucky ones.
I arrived 45 minutes before the main business was due to start and there was no mistaking the venue because outside stood Steve Bray, the ‘infamous’ and extremely tiresome anti-Brexit campaigner, blasting out music in an effort to disrupt proceedings.
I didn’t see a single policeman which I found odd because you could hear the racket 100 yards away so it must have been extremely annoying for everyone in the nearby offices and apartments.
Thankfully the walls of the Emmanuel Centre are thick and there was only a brief moment during the meeting when the noise filtered through.
Meanwhile the rather officious security staff inside the building were taking their duties extremely seriously.
In a previous post I wrote about the problem we had before our reception in the House of Commons last Wednesday.
Well, security for the launch of Pop Con was similarly tight, to the extent that they tried to take my laptop case even though it had nothing in it apart from my iPad which I wasn’t handing over to anyone!
Eventually they lost interest which allowed me to slip past and into the hall which was already two-thirds full, 30 minutes before the event was due to start.
Fair play to Pop Con (I much prefer the abbreviated name, btw), it was teeming with journalists, broadcasters and camera crews, and I saw several familiar faces including Beth Rigby (Sky News), Christopher Chope (GB News), and Harry Cole (The Sun).
There were familiar faces in the audience too, notably former minister Lord Frost and a number of Conservative MPs.
Nigel Farage, working for GB News, was there too so the atmosphere, if not electric, was several notches above your average Westminster or party conference fringe event.
Eventually, at eleven o’clock, there was movement at the back of the hall and the speakers, led by former prime minister Liz Truss, swept in and took their seats at the front.
The first to speak was Mark Littlewood, formerly director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs and now the newly anointed director of Pop Con, whose baby I suspect this really is.
After a short introductory speech, Mark introduced the four speakers – Lee Anderson (until recently deputy chairman of the Conservative Party), Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, plus Mhairi Fraser, the Conservative PPC for Epsom and Ewell.
Truss and Rees-Mogg were clearly the big draws, but Anderson gave arguably the most entertaining speech. He certainly got the biggest laugh when he said, “Jacob and I were both born on an estate, except that mine was a council estate.”
For me, though, it was Mhairi Fraser who made the bigger impression when she declared, "The state is no Mary Poppins," adding, "It's time to put nanny to bed".
Rishi Sunak's generational tobacco ban was one of the policies she criticised, and her comments drew warm applause which surprised me a bit because Conservative audiences can be capricious when it comes to smoking.
Here, though, her criticism of the generational ban was met with approval, so I hope the PM was listening and taking notes.
Overall, it was a well organised event that attracted a large audience and an impressive amount of media coverage.
The coverage may have been overwhelmingly negative but given the political climate that's to be expected and I don't think it will concern Pop Con’s director too much.
Truth is, most campaign directors would be thrilled with the interviews and column inches the launch generated, and Mark is no stranger to controversy. In fact, he seems to enjoy it.
He also has a thick skin (he's a former Lib Dem press officer, for goodness sake!) and won’t be phased by the initial reaction, I’m sure.
Pop Con’s launch may have provoked derision on social media and in parts of the mainstream media, but it put it on the political map, and after a single event you can't ask for much more.
If I have one small criticism, based on nothing more than the launch, it was the scattergun nature of the speeches, a problem best summed up by political journalist Kate McCann (Times Radio).
'So far,' she posted on X, 'speakers at Pop Con have rallied against: smoking ban, green levies, Davos man, private jets, not being able to mine fossil fuels, fear of steak tax, cake tax, the EU, courts, quangos in general, “Green weirdos”, self-ID, Equality Act, Covid lockdowns, Human Rights Act.'
In his closing remarks Mark announced that Pop Con is going to publish a book in June, which may clarify things, but leaving the hall I wasn't entirely sure what I had just witnessed.
Was it the launch of a new grassroots movement to bring about change within the Conservative Party, as we were led to believe, or was it something else - the first tentative step, perhaps, towards a new, populist, centre-right party to rival the Conservative Party itself?
The grassroots movement idea is certainly consistent with what I know of Mark because ever since I’ve known him (and I don’t claim to know him well) he has been an advocate of grassroots movements.
Back in the day I remember him arguing for a grassroots movement of smokers. (We disagreed not on the concept, but on the practicality. In my view, that ship had sailed long ago, if it ever existed.)
Today the army Mark wants to march on Westminster is from a rather different pool of potential foot soldiers, but the principle is much the same.
Whether the ambition of a low tax, small state movement is achievable at present remains to be seen. Realistically, this has to be a long-term project.
I would query too whether attempting to revive a dead horse (the current Conservative Party) is even the way to go. It’s such a broad church, some MPs are Conservative in name only.
So instead of banging heads against brick walls, how about launching a UK version of the ACT party in New Zealand (whose hand was behind the generational tobacco ban being dropped)?
It’s true that under our first past the post (FPTP) voting system, small parties have a huge disadvantage, but I suspect that launching a political party with consistent, clearly defined, policies may ultimately be easier and more impactful than trying to change from within an existing behemoth that has no identity or purpose other than winning general elections.
Either way, I’ll be watching with interest.
Postscript: Prior to its launch, and before I had even heard of Pop Con, I had invited three of the five speakers at last week’s event to attend and address Forest’s generational tobacco ban event at the House of Commons.
I was told that one had a previous commitment (fair enough).
A second accepted our invitation but didn’t turn up, despite being sent a reminder.
The third, disappointingly, didn’t even reply to our invitation(s).
Here’s the leaflet we took into the House of Commons last week.
As I explained in my previous post (House rules), a background banner featuring the same caricature was confiscated by security staff on the grounds that:
“You can’t have a banner with the prime minister pushing a pram.”
Fortunately the leaflets and beer mats (that featured the same illustration) weren’t detected by the jobsworths so we got those through without mishap.
You can download the leaflet by clicking on the image below. Copies are being sent to MPs, journalists and broadcasters.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 at 18:10 
