Labour's hospital smoking ban is doomed to fail

I have spent a quarter of a century caring for people dying from smoking. Deaths of this sort are not only premature but often horrible. My mother’s death from lung cancer was both. The puritan nature of my medical heart should, therefore, leap up at the new restrictions of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, introduced to parliament today. Smoking, Labour have declared, should be banned outside schools and hospitals. How they intend to police the ban, they haven’t said.

Self-righteous pleasure at seeing other people’s freedoms being reduced – unhealthy freedoms one disapproves of – should come naturally to a practising doctor. Instead, I’m struggling to feel even a frisson of morally superior joy. Something is amiss. The problem is not that I lack the instinct to take pleasure in the diminishment of other people’s enjoyments. The problem is the Bill.