Smoke-free air is so overrated

One of the difficult things about being a smoker - apart from the smell, the self-hate, the social exclusion and all the exciting diseases - is that it's a very hard habit to defend. How on earth can you justify polluting the atmosphere for fellow diners? Answer: "It's not pollution! It's a lovely smell!"

By what possible rationale can you put service-industry workers at risk from passive smoking? "Aw, come on, I bet you they all smoke."

Then how can you put your liberty to kill yourself above the liberty of others to enjoy clean air? "They are just spoilsports! Clean air is so overrated!"

None of it is very convincing, is it? It wouldn't win you any cups in a debating society. But, luckily, we're off the hook, at least for now. Health Secretary John Reid (a doctor, albeit a PhD, so he must be right) has trounced Mayor Ken Livingstone's plans for a London-wide smoking ban. In a move that has been billed as a compromise but is actually a drubbing, he has decided that we can continue to smoke so long as that place has a licence.

It is unclear as yet how difficult these licences will be to obtain, but publicans can rest assured that if they have any difficult forms to fill in, I'll be happy to help.

The fact is, every smart restaurant that's opened in the past year has done so with a total no-smoking policy. Not just austere, healthy Japanese haute cuisine like Umu, either; even Thyme, the spectacularly cool eating branch of the club called The Hospital, won't let you smoke.

You'd think they'd let you puff in The Hospital - they always used to let you in Pharmacy. And at the risk of sounding like a craven addict, they're no fun, these smoke-free evenings.

You don't feel at all like a bon viveur, however extensive your meal or impressive your brandy glass. You feel like a naughty sixth-former who can't wait for the foie gras terrine to be over and done with so you can sneak off for a snout before the medallions of bleeding venison (I'm using bleeding as an expletive, you understand, not a cookery term).

All that I can deal with - there are, after all, other restaurants. You don't have to go to the best; you can always go to Pizza Express. But if the experience were repeated in pubs, bars and regular eateries, I'd have to consider drastic measures, like a nicotine drip or never going out again. London, in other words, wouldn't be London. But that isn't why they've made this excellent decision.

Their main motivation, as far as I

can make out, is not that they don't want to be killjoys, it's that they don't want to look like killjoys (a subtle but important distinction). After all the accusations of nannying, the last thing they want to do is ram the point home with a ban that only 42 per cent of Londoners are in favour of. And this is the most compelling argument against a ban: the limits of a government's responsibility to its populace are that they give us the information we need to live healthily.

In other words, they can tell us that salt is bad for us, that there's sugar in Coke, that binge drinking leads to drunkenness and animal fat makes you, er, fat. But once we have all this information, we must be free to do as we will with it, NHS burden be damned.

Smoking, beyond all other vices, is the one danger with which we are all familiar. There cannot be a person in the country who doesn't know that it causes cancer and heart problems. Indeed, a recent survey showed that we generally overestimate its risks, surprisingly, so if a campaign were launched accurately delineating them, we'd all heave a sigh of relief and smoke still more.

Naturally, the most health-conscious among us will accuse the Government of not doing enough, but perhaps they can be placated with its proposed sideban on smoking on NHS property. There are two key exceptions to this - for bereaved relatives and the mentally ill. But it's hard to see how this could be enforced. Will there be a cigarette monitor who approaches smokers and says, "Excuse me, are you grieving, or just mentally ill?" It's not going to be an enviable job - as dangerous as cigarettes are to the lungs, they can also do a lot of damage if someone pokes you in the eye with one of them.

So, a Government that is commonly associated with po-faced prohibition has come down on the side of fun over good sense. Non-smokers can make their own fog with all the steam coming out of their ears; I shall be celebrating with a fag or two. And London will continue to be London.