All David Cameron's problems gone, in a puff of tobacco smoke Well, I want never gets, as nanny state likes to say, was the instinctive reaction to that. I want to arrive at a place where I literally have a full head of hair, a six-pack stomach and a Bajan beach house. I wouldn't mind the pair of lungs I had at 19, come to that, after 30 years of filling Treasury coffers with tax on every type of tobacco all the way from chewing, via cigars, cigarettes and Sherlock Holmesian shag, to snuff. Hand on doubtlessly furred-up heart, it makes no sense to criticise a Health Secretary for promoting health. But it would be nice if just once he showed some gratitude. Nothing lavish, because none of us smokes for a pat on the back (not with the paroxysmal coughing that induces). Something like, "Look, I hate making you smokers feel as shifty and furtive as the guy hovering beneath the top shelf until the newsagent's clears. I admire what you do for the Big Society, by paying billions a year in tax, and contributing untold billions more by not lingering to collect the pension, filling the care homes and blocking my hospital beds. But sorry, medical facts are medical facts. Those facts need no reprising. It is a very long time since George VI was advised, in the movie at least, that smoking would help his stammer by relaxing his larynx, and that cigarettes were a virtual panacea. It may be the smoker's way to hide from the actuarial odds by citing the old boy down the road who smoked four packs a day all his life, and died peacefully at 97. We may also practise transference - as a 60-a-day man, my father was so alarmed by the carcinogenic properties of washing-up liquid (some crazy scare story) that he banned it from the kitchen. We may even semi-joke about smoking to avoid the horrors of impoverished old age, and relish the irony that nicotine seems the best protection against the Alzheimer's we won't live long enough to develop. But the humour is brittle - it seldom survives the first coughing up of blood into the sink - because we all know the score (that of a requiem mass). We are equally aware that nothing is better designed to tempt the 15-year-old than hiding the cigarette away and making it an even more forbidden fruit, or vegetable, or whatever tobacco might technically be. The more covert and socially unacceptable, the cooler it becomes. But it is expecting too much for the Health Secretary publicly to acknowledge that, or to replace the doomy packet warnings (smoking kills/ stinks/ shrinks your willy) with one targeted at the young, reading "If you give up by 35, you'll probably be fine," even if thoracic specialists believe this to be true. It also seems a step too far to ask Mr Lansley to leave the pieties to his chain-smoking junior, the aptly named Simon Burns. As the Tory minister overheard in the Commons referring to Mr Speaker Bercow as a "stupid, sanctimonious dwarf," he would be too seductive an advert for the mind-sharpening properties of Virginia's finest. Mr Burns belongs to an ever-shrinking political sub-species that might be repopulated if others realised how humanising the habit is. The only endearing thing Nick Clegg ever said was on Desert Island Discs, when he chose for his luxury item a stash of cigarettes. In that moment, he seemed less a prissy sell-out than another feeble sinner, and was however briefly all the less irritating for that. Painting Barack Obama as an arugula-chomping elitist ponce became a shade harder for Republicans once it emerged that he was still sneaking the odd crafty one on the terrace outside the Oval Office, and fibbing about it to Michelle. If David Cameron really has given up, as he claims, this might be the right moment, politically, to start again in the cause of allaying the impression of lofty aloofness. Yet lopping decades off the life span is a high price even for egomaniacs to pay for power, and on thoughtful reflection Mr Lansley's wish must eventually come true. One day, smoking will literally not be a normal part of life, if any part of life at all, and people will read about it with the same jaw-gaping disbelief they may feel today about slavery, the criminalising of homosexuality, or the election to Parliament of Gyles Brandreth. But that day will dawn too late for those who follow Jesus Christ's example by giving our lives that others might live with some sort of pension at least.