The many flaws in Sunak's smoking wheeze

In the run-up to the Conservative party conference, Rishi Sunak was promoting himself as a serious politician who wanted workable policies that respect consumer choice. No more war on motorists! No more pie-in-the-sky net zero promises! Here was a practical man in tune with the concerns of ordinary people.

Having teed himself up as a pragmatic, back-to-basics Conservative, it was all the more puzzling when, in his keynote speech, he announced a preposterous anti-smoking gimmick borrowed from Jacinda Ardern that no one was asking for. New Zealand is the only country to have taken seriously the idea of increasing the age at which people can buy cigarettes by one year every year. Last December, the Kiwis banned anyone born after 2010 from ever buying a pack of fags. It will be five years before this starts to bite, although it may be academic by then because the government is also removing nearly all the nicotine from cigarettes, so it is doubtful whether many smokers will be buying tobacco legally anyway.