Doug Naysmith (RIP) and a rather surprising claim to fame

They say you should never speak ill or disrespectfully of the dead, and I don’t intend to start now.

Nevertheless, I am a little stumped.

Yesterday the Telegraph published an obituary of former Labour MP Doug Naysmith, who died recently, aged 82, and the headline read:

Doug Naysmith, MP who campaigned successfully to have smoking banned in public places

How strange. Having campaigned against bans on smoking in public places for most of the period Naysmith was an MP (1997-2010), I can honestly say I don’t remember him at all.

There are many people I do remember campaigning to have smoking banned in public places, but the former MP for Bristol North West is not one of them.

According to the Telegraph however he was ‘a driving force within the Health Select Committee’ and:

His own proudest moment came in 2007 when the Government banned smoking in public places, in good measure as a result of his campaigning.

Seriously?!

I’ve done a quick online search and I can find just one news report about the smoking ban that features a quote by Doug Naysmith and it’s from October 2005:

Why UK differs on smoke ban policy (BBC News)

Ironically it features a lengthy comment from me as well, and I still don’t remember him!

Look, I don’t want to disparage the man and his achievements. He clearly dedicated himself to public service (he was also a Bristol city councillor for 21 years), which is something I respect.

But the Telegraph obituary seems to be re-writing history, and I’m not sure why.

Update: Neither the Bristol Post (Tributes to former Bristol MP Dr Doug Naysmith who has died) nor ITV (West Country) mention the smoking ban in their reports of Doug Naysmith’s death, far less the claim that it was introduced ‘in good measure as a result of his campaigning’.

So why the Telegraph?

Update #2: Today's ASH Daily News doesn't mention the Telegraph's obituary which rather supports my point.

Update #3: ASH has belatedly included the Telegraph’s obituary in its Daily News bulletin (July 13), adding this (barely intelligible) note:

Doug Naysmith was an active member of the Health Select Committee in a first for a Select Committee tabled all-party amendments removing the exemptions to the smoking ban in the Health Bill 2005 for licensed premises and private members clubs. The amendments were passed on a free vote by a majority of 200, paving the way for implementation of comprehensive smokefree laws in England in 2007

Frankly, I’m none the wiser. Are you?

West End guys (and girls)

Strange as it may seem, I happen to know the lyricists of two new West End musicals.

One is my godson. (More on him later.) The other I have known for 40 years.

I first met Todd Buchholz in 1983 when I was invited by the Young Americas Foundation, a ‘conservative youth movement’, to spend two weeks in Washington DC.

Todd studied law at Harvard, then economics at Cambridge, and was later a White House advisor during George Bush’s presidency.

Today he is best known as an economist and author whose titles include the bestselling New Ideas From Dead Economists.

In recent years, however, having been one of the original backers of Jersey Boys, the ‘global smash-hit musical’, Todd has acquired a new interest.

Together with his daughter Victoria, he has written his own musical inspired by the life of Gino Bartali, an Italian road cyclist who won the Tour de France in 1938 and 1948:

With his cycling career as a cover, Bartali cycled thousands of miles between cities across Italy. Hidden in the frame of his bike were falsified identity cards and other secret documents to help victims of the Second World War cross borders to safety from Mussolini’s fascist regime. His efforts saved hundreds of persecuted Jews and other refugees, many of whom were children.

Todd tells me that Gino Bartali, like most men at the time, was a smoker “who credited smoking with helping him win” the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia. “He felt it gave him energy.”

On stage however Todd admits that the only character who smokes is the baddy, Bartali’s former friend turned fascist collaborator, Mario. (Still, better than nothing!)

Glory Ride has been in development for the best part of a decade and in November 2022, after workshops in New York and Los Angeles, the show finally premiered in London when a handful of work-in-progress staged concerts were performed at The Other Palace.

The reviews were good enough to lead to the offer of a four-month run showcasing the full production at Charing Cross Theatre this summer.

By coincidence, in the mid Nineties I produced a one-off variety show at the same venue.

In those days it was known as The Players Theatre and specialised in Victorian style music hall entertainment, like The Good Old Days on TV (which older readers will remember).

The auditorium has around 300 seats, so it’s one of the smallest theatres in the West End. However it’s built under the arches at Charing Cross station - hence the long, curved ceiling - so it’s quite atmospheric.

The first performance of Glory Ride was in April and the show will close, after this initial run, on July 29.

I saw the staged concert last year and this week I am going to see the full show.

Reviews, it’s fair to say, have been mixed. The Times (‘great idea, executed with enough energy to power the most reluctant cyclist up a mountain’) gave it 3/5 stars, but what an achievement to devise and write a musical and get it on the London stage with a full cast.

As for my godson, Tom Ling, his achievement has been to co-write the lyrics for a new musical that will premiere at Soho Place, the first new build West End theatre in 50 years.

Based on a best-selling autobiography by Henry Fraser, a keen sportsman whose life changed for ever following a diving accident in 2009, The Little Big Things opens on September 2 and is currently booking until November 25.

I’ll write about it again when it opens. In the meantime I have a confession.

I have been a terrible godfather to Tom, rarely remembering his birthday or any other important occasion, for which I can only apologise.

If, however, The Little Big Things is a success I want him to know that I never doubted his talent and I am always here for him.

What do public vaping ban and 10mph speed limits have in common?

The name Rachael Maskell may not be familiar to most of you but give it time.

Two months ago the Labour MP for York Central suggested that councils should introduce speed limits of ten miles an hour in residential areas.

10mph!!

As someone who is struggling to adapt to the 20mph limits that have been adopted in much of central London and other areas around the country, the idea that it should be reduced further - to a speed significantly slower than the average cyclist (15mph) - is hard to bear.

It’s pretty clear that some politicians and campaigners won’t be happy until drivers have been driven off the road completely.

It’s further evidence too that some people are never satisfied. They always want to go one step further, like extending the smoking ban to outdoor areas.

Anyway, I mention Rachael Maskell because her name caught my eye again this week when the Government responded to a series of questions she had tabled in recent weeks about vaping:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to ban all vape advertising.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to ban vaping in all public indoor spaces.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to ban the use of vaping devices in vehicles that contain children.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to introduce plain packaging for vaping devices.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to require all vape devices to be sold in plain colour.

That’s a pretty comprehensive list. Who could have predicted it?!

Er, me, and I made it clear time and time again that vaping advocates would be partly responsible - should such measures be introduced - because of their repeated reluctance/refusal to oppose similar anti-smoking policies.

Give the prohibitionists an inch and they won’t even stop at a mile. After smoking, vaping was always going to be targeted, but vaping advocates chose to stick their heads in the sand or, worse, throw smokers under the bus in the hope that it might buy vaping some goodwill.

Fat chance.

Anyway, in a written answer to Rachael Maskell’s questions, Neil O’Brien, the minister for health and social care, responded with a fairly straight bat:

The Government recently ran a call for evidence on youth vaping that explored a range of themes including building regulatory compliance, the appearance and characteristics of vapes, their marketing and promotion, the role of social media, the environmental impact of vapes and the vape market. The call for evidence closed on 6 June.

We are now carefully examining the responses to identify opportunities to reduce youth vaping and we will explore issues such as vape advertising, plain packaging and colours, vaping in public places and the use of vapes in vehicles with children. We will publish our response in early Autumn which will outline our next steps.

I would be surprised if the current Conservative government adopted any of the measures Maskell raises.

Plain packaging is a possibility, but surely ministers and civil servants have far more pressing things to do with their time than impose a policy that will arguably have no significant effect.

(If the Government wants to reduce the number of children vaping it needs to crack down seriously on rogue retailers and criminals who are selling vapes illegally to under 18s.)

Maskell’s questions could however indicate the direction of travel under a future Labour government, hence my concern.

After all, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has already said it will be a “priority” for the next Labour government to reduce smoking and vaping, and if Labour follow the tobacco template nothing can be ruled out.

PS. Amusingly, following the recent local elections, Rachael Maskell wrote:

Power has moved. The country has spoken, rejecting the authoritarian orthodoxy of ruling parties and making Labour the lead party in local government, including here in York.

Oh, the irony (and lack of self awareness) that someone who is advocating 10mph speed limits and significant restrictions on vaping and e-cigarettes should be holding forth about the ‘authoritarian orthodoxy of ruling parties’.

You couldn’t made it up.

Peak practise

My friend Bill sent me this photo last night with a note:

Piz Palu this morning near St Moritz.

I’d never heard of Piz Palu so I looked it up.

It’s a mountain on the Swiss-Italian border that has three peaks - central, western and eastern summits.

Bill (at the back) and his fellow climbers (I’m guessing there were three of them including the one holding the camera) climbed the eastern summit (3,882m or 12,726ft).

The eastern peak was first climbed in August 1835. (There appear to be no records for when the central and western summits were first climbed).

Almost a century later a German silent film was made called The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929) with a fabulously tragic storyline.

You can read about it here.

I’m told that Piz Palu also features in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009).

I should add that Bill is an old schoolfriend. We met at Wormit Primary School in 1969, when my family moved to Scotland, and after that we both went to secondary school (Madras College) in St Andrews.

I later went to Aberdeen University and Bill went to Edinburgh, where he studied law.

After working in Edinburgh, then London (but only briefly) his career as a corporate lawyer took him to Hong Kong, Bermuda, and then the Cayman Islands.

Twenty years ago, possibly longer, he ‘retired’ to Ireland with his wife and family and I visit them whenever I’m in Dublin.

Since then his ‘hobby’ has been climbing mountains or going on expeditions to the Antarctic and other remote places.

In 2011, as part of a small team of climbers from Ireland, he even climbed ten previously unconquered peaks in Greenland, a feat reported by the BBC here.

I like to take some credit for all this because when we were at school we spent our summers camping, walking, and cycling, which must have been when he got the bug.

We began modestly and gradually got more ambitious.

In 1971, when we were 12, we camped overnight in a wooded area next to the beach overlooking Wormit Bay, a few hundred yards from my house.

We cooked sausages on an open fire until they were carbonised and my mother supplied a chocolate cake.

The following year we camped in a wood in Balmerino, a tiny hamlet overlooking the River Tay, four miles from home. We cycled there on our bikes, carrying our tent and supplies.

In ‘73 and ‘74, with two other friends from school, we pitched our tents in or near Pitlochry, 27 miles north of Perth, where stayed on local campsites for a full week.

(Pitlochry ‘74 was the year we were introduced, with terrible results, to Newcastle Brown Ale. Put it this way, I’ve never touched it since.)

In 1975 the four of us were driven to the Lake District by Bill’s father, whereupon we walked from Windermere to Keswick via Scafell Pike, camping in fields or campsites overnight.

Finally, in 1976, Bill and I spent a week or so cycling around central Scotland, staying at youth hostels including one at Loch Lomond that was more like a castle. It even had a library.

Today, while my old friend climbs some of the world’s highest peaks, I am happy to put my feet up on a cruise ship or chill out at an all inclusive resort.

I have enough memories of (modestly) walking, climbing and cycling to last me a lifetime!

Greatest lunch of the year?

On this day last year we hosted the first Forest Summer Lunch & Awards.

The venue was Boisdale of Belgravia and we had exclusive use of the restaurant and terrace from midday to 4.00pm.

A handful of guests stayed well beyond that and we were still on the terrace, drinking and, in some cases, smoking, when the news came through that health secretary Sajid Javid had resigned from Boris Johnson’s government.

Within half an hour our phones were lighting up all over again with the further revelation that Rishi Sunak had resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It was a remarkable few minutes - a real ‘Where were you?’ moment - because everyone realised that Boris’s days as PM were numbered and, whatever your opinion of him, it did feel like treachery.

The truth is though that the Westminster village lives for moments like that so there was a palpable sense of excitement and intrigue as we arranged to reconvene later at the Marquis of Granby, a pub close to the Houses of Parliament where Westminster politicos tend to hang out.

Anyway, this year’s Summer Lunch & Awards is on July 18.

After one or two false starts we put it back a couple of weeks because there were so many other events in June and early July we didn’t want it to clash with any of them.

Fortunately that decision seems to have been vindicated because the 2023 Summer Lunch has been fully subscribed for several weeks and we currently have a waiting list.

Guests include journalists and writers, think tanks, parliamentary researchers, and a handful of parliamentarians, so I’m looking forward to it.

I should add that Boisdale MD Ranald Macdonald is a busy man.

As well as co-hosting the Forest Summer Lunch with me on July 18, he is also hosting the Boisdale Editor’s Lunch on July 12.

The first Editor’s Lunch was at Boisdale of Belgravia in 2017. (I wrote about it here.)

The following year it moved to Boisdale of Canary Wharf, a much larger venue, where we held Forest’s 40th anniversary dinner in 2019 and, before that, the Forest Freedom Dinner that ran from 2012 to 2017.

The Editor’s Lunch was paused by Covid but returned in 2021 whereupon I found myself sitting next to the hugely entertaining Simon Bartholomew, guitarist with The Brand New Heavies, and ‘New Orleans singing sensation Acantha Lang'. (See ‘That’s life’.)

In an email to this year’s guests Ranald describes The Editor’s Lunch as ‘The greatest lunch of the year’, adding that guests will include ‘an eclectic bunch of journalists, economists, politicians, authors, musicians, generals, food writers, wine producers and chefs’.

He may be right but I hope our more modest event at Boisdale of Belgravia doesn’t disappoint!

How the harm principle was hijacked and weaponised against individual freedom

Letters on Liberty are exactly what they say they are.

Launched in December 2020 and published by the Academy of Ideas, they are short essays (less than 3,000 words apiece), each one dedicated to achieving a freer society.

Titles to date include Risking It All: The Freedom to Gamble (Jon Bryan), The Future of Free Speech (Jacob Mchangama), The Liberating Power of Education (Harley Richardson), and Freedom Is No Illusion (Frank Furedi).

Others include Liberty in a Narcissistic Age (Roslyn Fuller), Greens: The New Neo-Colonists (Austin Williams), and Beyond the Culture Wars (Jacob Reynolds).

Letters on Liberty are published in bundles of three and the latest titles, just out, are Against Reparations (James Heartfield), AI: Separating Man from Machine (Sandy Starr), and Beyond the Harm Principle (Rob Lyons).

All three are worth reading but it's Rob's essay that will arguably be of most interest to readers of this blog.

He takes John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle' – which first appeared in On Liberty in 1859 and is often quoted by libertarians – and demonstrates how it has been hijacked and weaponised against individual freedom.

According to Mill, the actions of individuals should only be restricted or punished if they harm others.

That, of course, was the justification for the smoking ban, which was introduced in the UK after it was claimed, but never remotely proved, that 11,000 non-smokers were dying each year as a result of passive smoking.

The problem, writes Rob, is that, 'If we take the notion of harm to its extremes, almost anything we don't like could be described as harmful', and that's exactly what is happening today.

Today the concept of 'harm' covers not just physical harm but anything that may cause offence and therefore 'harm' us in other ways.

But as Rob correctly points out, 'If we want to live in a free society, we have to tolerate things we don't like.'

How, then, can we rescue the harm principle from the 'meddlesome opponents of freedom'? According to Rob, there is a strong case for amending it as follows:

We should be free to do what we want as long as it does not harm others where they cannot avoid that harm.

Would that make a difference? In theory it might. In practice, I'm not sure. As Rob himself admits:

The trouble with trying to rescue the harm principle, by trying to find a more modest and reasonable version of it, is that reasonableness seems to be in short supply.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the war on tobacco.

As we know, anti-smoking zealots are never happy and as soon as they achieve one goal they immediately target another, regardless of whether it's fair or reasonable or based on proven physical harm to others. (Outdoor smoking bans, for example.)

Freedom of speech is also under threat because of perceived 'harm' to others, and Rob covers that issue too.

Beyond the Harm Principle is available to download free here.

Alternatively, to purchase or subscribe to the print edition of this and other Letters on Liberty, click here.

What’s in a name?

Writing in the Daily Mail last week, following the death of the former Scotland football manager Craig Brown, the writer and satirist Craig Brown wrote a piece about namesakes and sharing his name with someone in the public eye.

See ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated …’.

By coincidence, I was recently embroiled - not for the first time - in a mix up with my own near namesake, former minister The Rt Hon Sir Simon Clarke MP.

What happened was this.

I turned up for an event to which I had been invited and got past the initial security checkers, who were confirming the names of guests on their iPads, but when I went to collect my name badge the one they tried to give me read ‘The Rt Hon Sir Simon Clarke’.

As an aside, it has always surprised me that most people assume the name Clark is spelt with an ‘e’.

Surely the shortened version is the more obvious way to spell it because the ‘e’ is silent and adds nothing to the pronunciation?

Nevertheless, unless I correct them, or spell it out, that’s the default spelling the majority of people seem to adopt.

But I digress.

Bizarrely, it took several minutes before it was accepted that I wasn’t The Rt Hon Sir Simon Clarke and I was allowed to proceed, albeit without a badge of any description.

On reflection, though, I now think I should have accepted the badge they offered and worn it with pride, if only as an interesting social experiment.

Would people (those I didn’t know) react differently to someone identified as a ‘Sir’ and a ‘Rt Hon’?

Would they hang on my every word? More important, would they laugh at my jokes and wry observations?

Another thought occurred. What if I had taken the badge and put it in my pocket for future use?

Would I get a better table if I discreetly showed it to the maître d' in a swanky hotel? Would I be fast-tracked through airports and offered complimentary upgrades?

Eventually I would be outed as an imposter, but until then?

Anyway, this is the fourth or fifth time I’ve been confused for the member of Parliament for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (and former Chief Secretary to the Treasury).

The first time was when another MP sent a text that was clearly not intended for me. (I replied, pointing this out, and he laughed, nervously.)

Better still was the text from yet another MP requesting an urgent meeting, a meeting I naively turned up for.

I wasn’t embarrassed, but he was! (You can read about it here.)

I’ve also been contacted with requests to appear on TV and radio when it was not immediately apparent that they wanted Simon Clarke MP rather than the director of Forest.

The strange thing is that, although Simon Clark(e) is quite a common name, it’s only been an issue (for me) since my near namesake was elected to Parliament in 2017.

Before that, nothing.

The surname Clark(e) has been around for centuries, as you might expect, and Simon was a popular choice during the post war baby boom era, but the only Simon I knew growing up was a younger cousin on my mother’s side of the family so we didn’t share a surname.

There are nevertheless lots of Simon Clarks, if you look for them, including a horror novelist from Doncaster, a videomaker and science communicator from Bath, a freelance sports photographer, a former English professional footballer, and many more.

And that doesn’t include the many Simon Clarkes.

Talking of which, several years after I broke up with a girlfriend (or, more accurately, she broke up with me), she sent me a birthday card addressed to … Simon Clarke.

Ouch, that hurt.

Whisper it, but the NHS was NOT universally welcomed in 1948

The National Health Service is 75-years-old next week.

The concept (providing universal healthcare free at the point of delivery) is hard to fault, but I find the nation’s almost religious devotion to this less than stellar organisation hard to stomach.

It was bad enough having it feature in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, but having a children's choir sing 'Happy Birthday' to the NHS on Newsnight this week took the biscuit.

Have we gone mad?

I'm not going to debate the pros and cons here and now, but on its 75th birthday I thought I'd remind readers that not everyone was as keen on the birth of the NHS as we're led to believe.

Take my grandfather, for example. The details are a bit sketchy but this is what I can piece together from what my mother may have told me over the years. (Recollections may vary, to coin a phrase.)

I'm not sure the exact year he was born but my grandfather was born and brought up in Keswick in the Lake District and when he left school (at 14, I think), he got a job in a local pharmacy.

He then joined the medical corp and spent much of the First World War in Egypt, but it was only after the war that he went to Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in London where he qualified as a doctor.

Thanks to his pharmacy experience he was able to create his own medications for patients. (Can you imagine GPs being allowed to do that today?!)

After getting married, he and my grandmother (who was from Bannockburn in Scotland) moved to Wembley. I remember their house because they lived there until the mid Sixties when my grandfather retired and they moved to Colchester.

Ten years ago, following a meeting with Forest's accountants (who by coincidence are based in Wembley), I rang my mother and asked what my grandparents' old address was so I could drive past the house which I hadn’t seen for 50 years.

The address was Rosslyn Gardens, a short drive from the accountants' office which overlooked Wembley Stadium.

The reason I mention the stadium is because when it was opened in 1923 it was famously surrounded by fields and Wembley was very different to the rather ugly conurbation it is today.

That said, the tree-lined residential street was almost exactly as I remembered it, although it felt narrower.

The house looked smaller too, but that’s not surprising because I was only four or five the last time I was there so everything would have looked bigger!

When my grandparents lived in Rosslyn Gardens the surgery was on one side of the house and had its own entrance so patients didn't have to enter through the front door.

Which brings me back to the point of this post.

Many years ago I remember being told that my grandfather was not a fan of the NHS, especially the way it was introduced.

When the NHS was established in 1948 his patient list (ie the business he had worked hard to build up over 20 years) was commandeered by the state, for which he now had to work.

This isn't an argument against the NHS btw (that's a different debate), but the idea that it was universally welcomed is simply not true.

There were many doctors who were less than happy when their practices were taken over and effectively nationalised.

It's a story rarely if ever told, perhaps because it sits uncomfortably with the modern orthodoxy that the pre-NHS healthcare system in Britain was a blot on civilisation and the NHS represented a giant step forward.

That generation of doctors is dead now so everyone accepts, without quibble it seems, that the NHS saved the nation from health inequalities (which are nevertheless still with us) and avaricious private quacks.

I’m sure there were some dodgy doctors but my mother was a child in those pre-NHS days and she remembers my grandfather having a strict daily routine that rarely changed:

9.00-11.00am – Morning surgery
11.00-5.00pm – Home visits
5.00-6.00pm – Bite to eat
6.00-8.00pm – Evening surgery
8.00-late – More home visits

His surgery was open six days a week and he was available for home visits every day if required.

At that time, even taking inflation into account, most doctors earned far less than they do today when many GPs earn well in excess of £100,000 a year.

I don't begrudge them the money (they work hard to become doctors and have a job that comes with huge responsibilities) but I'm not convinced the service NHS patients receive today is an improvement on the past.

Anyway, it was interesting to see the house in Wembley. The separate entrance no longer exists and you would never guess that part of it had once been a doctor's surgery.

I'm due to visit our accountants quite soon so I might pop by again. I don't know about the NHS, but I'll happily toast the memory of my grandfather who dedicated his life to helping other people and didn’t expect to be revered or applauded (with pots and pans) for doing his job.