The good knight

I attended a drinks reception on Wednesday to belatedly celebrate the investiture, last year, of Sir Philip Davies.

In March 2024 the former Conservative MP for Shipley was awarded a knighthood by Rishi Sunak in what was described as a ‘surprise’ honours list.

Elected in 2005 before losing his seat at the 2024 general election, Philip was unusual for a politician because he stuck rigidly to his principles, even when they conflicted with policies being introduced by his own party in government.

I witnessed this first hand when he voted against plain packaging of tobacco. He also voted against other anti-tobacco measures introduced by Labour and the Conservatives.

He missed the second reading of Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill last April but sent us a message to say he would be voting against it at the third reading.

Of course, the third reading never happened because Sunak called an election, but I have no reason to think Philip wouldn’t have kept his word.

As it happens he never made a secret of the fact that he disliked smoking, but he also took the view that it was not the job of government to dictate how people live their lives.

If I remember, our paths first crossed in 2008 when he hosted, on behalf of Forest, a small tea party in the House of Commons. Writing about it I commented:

Exceeding our expectations, 17 MPs and five peers turned up. Of the MPs, there were eleven Conservatives, five Labour, and one Lib Dem …

Our host, Philip Davies, gave a short, well-received speech. I announced the launch of our new Amend The Smoking Ban campaign. And Trevor Baylis told a joke involving smoking and sex.

The following year (2009) he took part in a panel discussion hosted by The Free Society, Forest's sister campaign, in the Freedom Zone at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester.

I can’t remember what the subject was but that was the year Labour introduced legislation to ban the display of tobacco in shops so I’m sure that was one of the issues we addressed.

The other panellists were me, Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), Alex Deane (Big Brother Watch), and Claire Fox (Academy of Ideas).

The next year we invited Philip to take part in another discussion (‘Big Government Is Watching You: the surveillance society and individual freedom’) that was one of a series of events organised by Forest/The Free Society at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Delivering a passionate defence of surveillance cameras, he argued that they act as a deterrent to crime and many violent criminals would not be caught without them.

The event was chaired by political blogger and broadcaster Iain Dale who tweeted, ‘Philip Davies MP making superb anti civil liberties speech, even if I disagree with virtually all of it.’

Famously, Philip voted against the Tory whip over 250 times during his parliamentary career, which made it a little surprising that Rishi Sunak should personally award him a knighthood.

Then again, they both represented Yorkshire constituencies and they seem to be good friends.

Sunak was unable to be present in person on Wednesday so he sent a video message instead. In response Philip was so fulsome in his praise of the former prime minister I was genuinely gobsmacked. I had no idea he was such a fan boy!

Present in the room were members of what Philip called his various ‘families’. These included his actual family, personal and political friends, his current colleagues in the betting industry, and his GB News ‘family’. (He and his wife Esther McVey, who is still an MP, co-presented a show on the channel for two years.)

Faces I recognised included former Conservative leaders Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, and former Tory Chancellor Lord Lamont.

I spoke very briefly to another former Conservative MP David Nuttall who back in 2010 tabled a private member’s bill to amend the smoking ban to allow smoking rooms in pubs and private members’ clubs.

I also spoke to political journalist and self-confessed ‘leftie’ Michael Crick (Newsnight, Channel 4 News) who revealed he is writing a short biography of Edward Heath.

To be honest, though, I didn’t know many guests and when I arrived I didn’t know a single person, apart from our hosts.

Twelve years ago something similar happened when I attended a drinks reception prior to the Political Book Awards in London and I spent the longest hour of my life wandering around, glass in hand, speaking to no-one.

Even now I have nightmares thinking about it.

This time, older, wiser and less diffident, I marched up to two guests - complete strangers - and introduced myself.

One was a finance director, the other described himself as a ‘techie’. We started chatting and ten minutes later I was giving them my business card (at their request, I should add).

In the unlikely event they read this I’d like to thank them because without them the evening might have triggered an old and rather painful memory!

Instead, I ended up speaking to some interesting people as well as paying my respects to one of the good guys in politics.

Below (left to right): Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), Alex Deane (Big Brother Watch), Claire Fox (Academy of Ideas), Philip Davies and me at a fringe meeting organised by Forest at the Conservative party conference in Manchester in 2009

Reform leads opposition to tobacco sales ban, Tories divided

Update to Wednesday's post about the Tobacco and Vapes Bill.

Led by Nigel Farage, Reform UK has tabled an amendment to remove the generational ban on selling tobacco products to people born on or after 1 January 2009.

Labour's huge majority means it is doomed to fail but it will hopefully be debated on the floor of the House of Commons during the report stage on Wednesday (March 26).

Fair play to Farage and Reform for at least tabling the amendment, something the Tories have failed to do despite Kemi Badenoch's opposition to the Bill.

Unfortunately the Conservative Party is hopelessly split on the issue, but if it goes to a vote it will be interesting to see how many Tory MPs support Reform’s amendment.

Likewise the amendment I mentioned in an earlier post that would replace the generational ban in favour of raising the legal sale of tobacco from 18 to 21.

That amendment has been tabled by the DUP's Sammy Wilson with the support of Conservative grandee Sir John Hayes.

Realistically, given the numbers, both amendments will fall but at least the Bill will face some opposition in the Commons before it moves on to the House of Lords.

See: Tobacco and Vapes Bill – amendments and exemptions

Lang may his lum reek

I had lunch yesterday with Ranald Macdonald, founder and MD of Boisdale Restaurants.

Ranald missed the Forest lunch at Boisdale last year because of ill health but if he sounded a bit croaky yesterday it’s because he was recovering from the annual ‘Shooting Chefs’ competition that took place the day before.

No, I had never heard of it either, but the Boisdale Shooting Chefs Cup (now in its tenth year) brings together 25 or 30 of the country’s most accom­plished young chefs to com­pete ‘in cel­e­bra­tion of the con­sump­tion of British game across the coun­try’.

The competition took place, I think, at the Holland & Holland Shooting Grounds in West Lon­don. Afterwards everyone boarded a Routemaster bus and were driven to the Belgravia restaurant for a boozy three-course lunch.

Although the purpose of our meeting yesterday was to discuss the details of a forthcoming Forest lunch, including the menu, the conversation occasionally went off piste.

For example, when I mentioned I am going to Skye next month, Ranald offered to arrange a private tour of the Museum of the Isles which just happens to focus on Clan Macdonald.

(Ranald - or Ranald Og Angus Macdonald, to give him his full name - is the elder son of the 24th captain and chief of Clan Macdonald of Clanranald.)

He also revealed he has just bought a five-bedroom house in the Outer Hebrides - without, it seems, having visited it (the house not the islands).

It’s 21 years since I first reached out to him. In 2004 Forest’s office in Palace Street was half a mile from Boisdale of Belgravia, the original Boisdale restaurant.

Ranald, who founded Boisdale in 1989, was happy to support our campaign against the workplace smoking ban, and one of our first events was a small private dinner at Boisdale of Bishopsgate (now closed).

Guests that evening included David Hockney (who told me it had been a “life-enhancing experience”) and Oscar-winning screenwriter, the late Sir Ronald Harwood.

In 2006 Ranald joined us at the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth where we hosted a Prohibition themed reception for almost 400 people, the highlight of which was Boisdale’s MD being ‘arrested’ by actors wearing police uniforms who charged him with “inciting people to enjoy themselves”.

He was marched off to the accompaniment of ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’.

Looking back it remains one of my favourite Forest events, and I still remember the morning after when we sat on the terrace of our hotel in the autumn sunshine, eating breakfast and recovering from the night before.

Since then we’ve hosted numerous events at the Belgravia and Canary Wharf restaurants (the latter opened in 2011), culminating in our 40th anniversary dinner at Boisdale of Canary Wharf in 2019 when 200 guests were invited to mark the occasion.

Our most successful event is probably the gala dinner we hosted at the Savoy Hotel in London a few days before the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007.

The original plan was to host it at Boisdale of Belgravia but the Eccleston Street restaurant can only accommodate 70 people in the main restaurant and we wanted to go big to mark one of the last occasions when people could eat, drink and smoke in an indoor ‘public’ place.

Organised at four weeks’ notice, our target was 200 guests in the 400-capacity ballroom.

On the night there were 380 people, including 300 who paid £96 per head, plus guest speakers Andrew Neil, Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), and Antony Worrall Thompson. (The freebies went to MPs, peers, journalists and other special guests.)

The event also attracted reporters and film crews from twelve countries including Russia, France, Germany and Greece, while the BBC sent a team from Newsnight.

Eighteen years later we’re still planning, and plotting. Lang may his lum reek.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill - amendments and exemptions

The report stage of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill takes place next Wednesday (March 26).

Amendments will be debated and voted upon in the House of Commons before the Bill moves to its third reading, at which point some of the MPs who didn't vote at second reading may come out of the closet and reveal their preferences.

You can read the current list of amendments here.

I assume that no reader of this blog will be directly affected by the generational tobacco sales ban, if and when it is introduced.

Nevertheless it should interest you that the DUP's Sammy Wilson has tabled an amendment that, if passed, would mean it wouldn't be an offence to sell 'tobacco products, herbal smoking products and cigarette papers to people born on or after 1 January 2009'.

Instead it would only be illegal to sell those products to a 'person under the age of 21'.

Another amendment, tabled by Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, 'exempts tobacco products other than cigarettes and hand rolling tobacco from the offence of selling tobacco products to a person born on or after 1 January 2009'.

In other words, an exemption for cigars, cigarillos, and heated tobacco.

A further amendment, tabled by Lib Dem MP Helen Morgan and supported by four of her colleagues, would restrict the Secretary of State 'to only being able to designate open or unenclosed spaces outside a hospital, children’s playground, nursery, school, college or higher education premises as smoke-free areas'.

Personally I object to smoking being banned in any open space, regardless of whether it's outside hospitals, schools or higher education premises, but if the amendment makes it harder for future Secretaries of State to extend smoking bans to more outdoor spaces then it may be a small price to pay.

The problem is that none of these amendments have been tabled by Labour MPs and without their backing I can't see any of them getting the votes they need.

Unfortunately any plans we may have had to make some noise while the Bill is being debated in the House could be dashed by another political event on the same day – the Chancellor's Spring statement.

What a coincidence!

All is not lost though because whatever happens next week the Tobacco and Vapes Bill still has to go to the House of Lords where it could be amended by peers, so there's plenty to play for, even if the odds are clearly against any dilution of the Bill as it currently stands.

Watch this space.

I once met …

Self-help guru Paul McKenna has been sharing with readers of The Sun an ‘exclusive 25-minute hypnosis’ video that helps people quit smoking.

'Self-help guru' and 'life coach' are not descriptions I normally warm to but I bumped into McKenna once, many years ago, and he was very nice.

We were at Western House (later renamed Wogan House) in London waiting to be interviewed on Radio 2.

We weren’t on together because I was there to talk about smoking and he was there to promote a new book about something else, but we had a short chat while we sat outside the studio.

In fact, he instigated the conversation which was quite unusual.

I’ve sat in many green rooms with many ‘celebrities’ and it’s rare that they initiate a conversation with someone they’ve never met, let alone show an interest in that person by asking questions about their job.

It’s so rare that only two people stand out - Tony Blackburn, who I spoke to when we were waiting to record a pilot for a Marcus Brigstocke talk show over 20 years ago, and Paul McKenna.

Knowing McKenna helped people stop smoking I expected a negative reaction when he asked me what I did, but he wasn’t judgemental or anti-smoking at all.

Like Tony Blackburn, he was extremely personable and I liked him immediately.

I had a slightly different experience when I met another quit smoking guru, the late Allan Carr, in a BBC studio in Manchester.

It was on January 4, 2004, and we were about to appear on The Heaven and Earth Show, a Sunday morning programme that ran from 1998 to 2007 on BBC1 and addressed spiritual and moral issues.

The date should give you a clue that we had been booked to talk about a possible workplace smoking ban, which the Labour government was considering, under pressure from the tobacco control industry.

To my surprise Carr was opposed to a smoking ban, but not for the same reasons as me. In his view it would lead to smokers ‘binge smoking’ when they left the office at lunch or after work.

However, while we were both opposed to a ban, it would be wrong to say we saw eye to eye on anything else and I found him quite intense. As I wrote later:

I enjoyed The Heaven and Earth Show. I got to meet quit smoking guru Allen Carr, a strange little man, quite different from the smooth-talking salesman I had imagined. Although he gave up his 100-a-day habit 20 years ago, he's still addicted to smoking, albeit in a rather different way. Even in the green room he and his wife (they now live in Malaga) found it difficult to talk about anything else.

To be honest, I was surprised he talked to me at all off air because I was led to believe he could be extremely hostile to anyone who had connections with the tobacco industry, which he seemed to blame for his own smoking habit all those years before.

He died from lung cancer, aged 72, two years later, but although there was no meeting of minds on the wider issue of smoking, we didn’t part on bad terms.

We simply didn't agree and I didn't want to get into an argument with him or his wife off air. (They were clearly devoted to one another, although she said very little.)

While I’m name dropping I might as well mention a third celebrity whose easy charm and interest in others impressed me enormously when I met her.

Emma Forbes was a presenter on Saturday morning children’s TV in the Nineties. The daughter of actress Nanette Newman and film producer Bryan Forbes, she was a regular contributor on The Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV when our paths crossed in 2009 and she could not have been nicer.

I’ve just Googled her name and it seems she moved to America a few years ago with her husband and children and they have no plans to return, at least not permanently.

Who can blame them?!

Change of Hart

I recently finished reading Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip by Simon Hart.

I enjoy contemporaneous political diaries, although I've often wondered how ministers in particular find time to keep such detailed journals of their lives when they must be so busy and exhausted at the end of each day.

My favourite political diary is probably Gyles Brandreth’s Breaking The Code: Westminster Diaries 1992-97, partly because I'm familiar with most of the people and events he wrote about. But it's also beautifully written.

Likewise the diaries of Alan Clark (1972-1999), a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments, and a serial seducer of (other) women.

I also enjoyed A View From The Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin (a Labour MP and former journalist), and there are several more I would add to that list.

The diaries of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon (1918-1938) are often cited as among the best of the genre, but I struggled with the first volume and eventually gave up.

Likewise the three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by Richard Crossman that cover the years 1964 to 1970 when the author was a minister in Harold Wilson's first Labour government.

Unless you're a historian, I do think it helps if you lived through the period in question and can therefore relate to the people and events the author writes about.

I was born in 1959 but wasn't politically aware until the 1970 election when Ted Heath upset the odds and defeated Wilson. Thereafter I took a keen interest.

Which brings me back to Ungovernable. Elected to Parliament in 2010, Simon Hart is the former chief executive of the Countryside Alliance who was appointed Chief Whip by Rishi Sunak, having been Secretary of State for Wales under Boris Johnson.

Ungovernable begins on election day, December 12, 2019, when the Conservatives won a landslide victory, thanks largely to Boris.

The author gives Boris credit for several things but eventually joined the pack of MPs who resigned from Johnson’s government in July 2022, forcing the PM out of office.

Having supported Sunak in the subsequent leadership race, he was overlooked by the winner, Liz Truss, before returning to government as Chief Whip under Sunak.

Wearing my Forest hat I was interested to know more about Sunak’s generational tobacco sales ban – how it came about, and what discussions took place behind the scenes – but the book reveals very little.

What it does confirm is that the idea for a generational ban in the UK came out of the blue because there is no mention of smoking or tobacco policy until September 1, 2023, a month before the Conservative Party conference in Manchester where Sunak would announce his vision for a smoke free Britain.

On September 12 Hart notes that ‘the latest three ideas, to scrap GCSEs, abandon HS2 north of Crewe and abolish smoking seem to be gathering pace’. Then, on September 28, he writes:

I get to see the early version of Rishi’s ‘big speech’. It’s a good, well-thought-out and intellectually compelling offering, but for some it will be seen to lack real political sex appeal. It deals with HS2, smoking and education thoughtfully. It’s hard to disagree, even if it is a speech that highlights three things we don’t like and fixes them rather than providing the ‘big vision’ some of our colleagues keep banging on about.

At party conference a few days later he reports that:

RS landed all three of his policy announcements with intelligence and clarity. Members were chuffed we had some real substance, and even the smoking ban landed okay, despite our fears it might provoke some audible groans from the libertarians.

There is no further mention of the generational ban, or smoking, until April 16, 2024, when Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill got its second reading in the House of Commons:

Today we vote on the PM’s smoking and vaping proposals. Our Party has become very pompous about ‘personal freedoms’ recently, so I recount in the whips meeting my dad’s attitude to seatbelts, which he resolutely refused to wear, as well as surprise our younger office colleagues by telling them that we always used to smoke in our offices, trains, planes and cinemas.

Pompous about ‘personal freedoms’? Read into that what you will, but I looked up Hart’s voting record on smoking and tobacco and I discovered that in 2012 he was one of 50 MPs, including 34 Conservatives, who wrote to health secretary Andrew Lansley expressing "serious concerns" about plain packaging.

According to the letter:

“There is no reliable evidence that plain packaging will have any public health benefit; no country in the world has yet to introduce it. However, such a measure could have extremely negative consequences elsewhere. The proposal will be a smuggler’s charter … This policy threatens more than 5,500 jobs directly employed by the UK tobacco sector, and over 65,000 valued jobs in the associated supply chain. … Given the continued difficult economic climate, businesses should not be subjected to further red tape and regulation”

Two years later Hart even voted against a ban on smoking in cars carrying children, telling his local paper:

“I will be voting against a ban. The reasons are quite simple really. Prohibition is rarely as effective as education. Of course smoking is bad for children – in cars, houses, or any other private place.

“Why do we not ban it altogether? Why do we not ban smoking whilst pregnant? Or for that matter any other activity that can potentially endanger minors? Because we try and strike a balance between protecting the public but stopping short of being bossy.

“There comes a time when we must resolve these issues by persuasion not the (often ineffective) tool of criminal sanction.”

Significantly, speaking in Parliament on April 3, 2014, he told health minister (and Conservative MP) Jane Ellison:

The Minister will be aware that it is already an offence to ... purchase tobacco under the age of 18. Would it be a good start to ensure that the current laws work before we start imposing new ones?

In other words, Simon Hart appeared to be ‘one of us’. What changed - other than being appointed Chief Whip by Rishi Sunak - to make him so dismissive of ‘personal freedoms’ whilst distancing himself from ‘libertarians’ in the party a decade later?

Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip by Simon Hart (Pan Macmillan)

The Reform egos have landed

Following the vicious squabbling at Reform UK, here’s a reminder of something I wrote in January 2022, five months before Boris Johnson was forced out of office by his Cabinet colleagues.

Commenting on the then PM’s precarious position, I wrote:

It’s a reminder of why I never got directly involved in politics. The problem, as I saw it, was that most politicians (and this goes back to my student days) spent far more time fighting their colleagues than challenging the ideas and philosophies of their political opponents.

Those on the same side of the political fence might agree on most issues but if one stood in the way of another they became sworn enemies and would do almost anything to bring their colleague down. Adult politics, it seems to me, is much the same and I have never wanted any direct part of it.

The Reform shenanigans also explain why I’m sceptical of grassroots membership organisations. As I commented here in response to a recent paper by Chris Snowdon:

Grassroots or membership organisations are not without their problems. For example, internal politics. This is not exclusive to such organisations but the odds on internal politics getting in the way is exacerbated because the smaller ones are often run by an elected committee whose members may have been voted in by a very small minority of members.

Such elections can throw up some freak results, including the election of ‘activist’ candidates - unrepresentative of the majority of members - whose primary aim is to disrupt the status quo.

Sometimes that can be a good thing. More often than not it’s like a cancer that threatens to destroy the organisation from within. Either way, it can be hugely disruptive and often very damaging to the organisation.

Democracy, then, has its flaws, but dictatorships rarely work well either. Even the most benign regimes rarely remain benign for long. Power corrupts, smouldering egos erupt, and the outcome is all too predictable.

Funnily enough, I’ve just discovered that I ‘muted’ Reform's Rupert Lowe on X several months ago. I’m not sure why (I have nothing against him personally) but I generally mute people if their opinions begin to make me feel uncomfortable, or if they post so often they start to dominate my timeline.

In Lowe's case it may have been a combination of the two, but I honestly can’t remember. Either way I’m not taking sides because I’m neither a member of Reform nor did I vote for the party in the general election.

As I said to a friend (who stood for Reform in the election), I couldn’t vote for the party because there were too many dodgy candidates and I didn’t like the aggressive, bullying behaviour of one member of the leadership group.

(It wasn’t Nigel Farage, to be clear, or Rupert Lowe, but it felt gauche and amateurish and as a result I am still struggling to take the party seriously.)

I said this to my friend long before the current brouhaha which is why I’m not surprised by what has happened. I am however a bit surprised it has happened quite so soon.

To be honest, I think this is probably a Westminster bubble story that will have relatively little impact on the current polls which put the party in second place behind Labour and just above the Conservatives.

In fact, I would think that regardless of recent events Reform has every chance of doing well in both the local elections and the forthcoming by-election that will follow the resignation of former Labour MP Mike Amesbury.

Beyond that however I can't help thinking that a party that can’t keep five MPs united and on the same page will struggle to build a stable platform for further growth, let alone form the next government.

In the (very) unlikely event that Reform was to win hundreds of seats, the spat between Farage and Lowe would be dwarfed by even bigger schisms.

See: Farage and Forest - a brief history

Wanted: a clear message on tobacco and vapes from the leader of the Opposition

It’s not just Guernsey that could raise the age of sale of tobacco from 18 to 21.

Ireland has already passed legislation to raise the minimum age of sale to 21 (from 2028), and this week it was reported that the Netherlands could consider the policy too.

Only the UK Government has plans to introduce a generational ban that will eventually outlaw the sale of tobacco to adults of all ages, but I suspect that 21 could become the norm in many other countries over the next decade, just as it is in the United States where introducing a minimum age of sale of 21 became a federal law in December 2019.

And here lies an opportunity for opponents of a generational ban in the UK because an amendment to raise the age of sale to 21 (replacing the gen ban) has been tabled by DUP MP Sammy Wilson and will be debated by MPs at the report stage and third reading of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill on Wednesday Msrch 26.

Although I'm still opposed in principle to raising the age of sale above 18, the age at we are legally recognised as adults, 21 would be better than a generational ban so in that sense I would welcome it, albeit through gritted teeth.

From the Government's point of view it surely makes sense to align the UK with some of our closest neighbours rather than risk a significant loss of revenue as a result of illicit trade or UK consumers choosing to buy their tobacco from legitimate retailers in more ‘liberal’ jurisdictions abroad.

Meanwhile we await the Conservative Party’s position on the generational ban and other measures in the Bill, including further restrictions on vapes.

I know Kemi Badenoch voted against the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, but watching the committee stage it was impossible to deduce what the Conservatives’ official position is because two of her MPs – Dr Caroline Johnson and newbie Jack Rankin – were often in open conflict.

As shadow health minister Dr Johnson was the senior of the two, and if you listened to her you could be forgiven for thinking the Tories want to go even further than Labour.

As far as I know, Conservative MPs will once again be given a free vote when the Bill returns to the Commons for the report stage and third reading, and I can see why that would appeal to the leadership who don't want to split a much reduced parliamentary party by forcing MPs to vote in a way that might provoke open rebellion from the likes of Bob Blackman, chair of both the APPG on Smoking and Health and the influential 1922 Committee.

But this is an early opportunity for Badenoch to put clear blue water between the party she leads and Labour. Unfortunately far too many Tory MPs pay lip service to freedom of choice and personal responsibility and when it comes to voting they are just as wedded to the nanny state as every other party, bar Reform.

That is not, btw, an endorsement of Reform whose descent into bitter infighting was entirely predictable. I have mentioned, several times, why I never wanted to go into party politics, and this is why – people spend far too much time fighting their own colleagues instead of the opposition.

Anyway, I'm strictly Team Kemi but I would like to see a clear statement from the leader of the Opposition concerning the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, and I will be disappointed if that opportunity goes begging because principles matter in politics and this is a chance to nail her more liberal colours firmly to the mast.

Voters want authenticity and leadership from politicians and that means sticking to your principles and beliefs. Yes, politicians have to be pragmatic too (Margaret Thatcher was more pragmatic and less of an ideologue than she is often given credit for), but a clear statement from the leader of the Opposition opposing the generational tobacco ban would be a welcome step forward for a Conservative Party that appears to have abandoned many of its core values.