And Another Thing | 15 November 2008

Not long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in its power (notably longer licensing hours) to encourage drinking? After all, we agreed, drink caused infinitely more human misery, both to drinkers themselves and to their families, than cigarettes. Smoking does not produce suicides, whereas drinking does, every day. Any doctor or hospital consultant will tell you that booze kills many more people than lung cancer, and that’s not even counting road deaths caused by drunken drivers. Above all, smoking does not lead to crime, whereas over 50 per cent of violent crimes are caused by alcohol. Certainly drink needs no encouragement from government to flourish — society, in Western countries, does that pretty comprehensively. For instance, literature is drink-sodden.

In the oeuvre of which novelist, I asked Gray, does drink play the biggest part? He thought Hemingway.