Is Rishi Sunak the least Tory Tory PM ever? He’s fundamentally Californian at heart: witness his terrible policy to ban cigarettes to anyone born from 2009 which was announced to great fanfare at conference.
That’s what contemporary Conservatism has come to: compulsory clean living
Fortunately, I belong to the lucky generation that can still kill itself with tobacco, though I write as a failed smoker. Try as I might, I can’t get the hang of it, and the times I tried left me with little doubt that it’s not good for you. I gave up the effort some time ago. But the thing about being grown up is that you can do things that are legal but not particularly healthy, like drinking to excess or smoking. The premise of the rules on these things is that we are rational enough to take risks on board and make our own minds up. We may wish that everyone should, after Aristotle, go for moderation in all things, but if we don’t, well, silly us.
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