‘Oi mister! Will you buy us summit in the shop? I got the money.’ ‘Here we go,’ I think, ‘another grotty 15-year-old making the usual request for a bottle of Dmitri Vodka or 20 Benson & Hedges. Reluctantly, remembering my rebellious teens, I agree. Surprisingly, he hands over £80. ‘Can you get me a Montecristo Linea 1935 Leyenda cigar?’ he asks. ‘Or, if they ain’t got that, a Davidoff Escurio Gran Toro. You can keep the change, mister.’
This event, of course, has never actually happened. But it seems to be within the government’s fervid imagination that it has. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which cleared the House of Commons last year and passed in the House of Lords this month, will make it illegal for anyone born after 1 January 2009 to buy tobacco products. That includes cigarettes – nasty things, their weird pleasure being only to satisfy the body’s demand for nicotine – and, even worse, vapes – those battery-powered dummies sucked on mindlessly by adults and children alike.
So far, no issue, unless you’re a fundamentalist on the age-old dilemma of whether the state should have the right to interfere with an adult’s freedom of choice to do what (more or less) only harms themselves. But here’s where the bill is clumsy regardless: it also includes cigars. And here we’re talking about the premium variety, not your machine-made Cafe Creme or Hamlet. Indeed, the bill makes no distinctions at all. All tobacco is equally verboten – and, in that misapprehension, the government is woefully at fault.
Cigars are an extreme niche. Each item is a complex and deep expression of the centuries-old craft of the particular roller who hand-made it; its taste and aroma an expression of the soil, the weather and the leaves from which it comes. In other words, they have a terroir every bit as much as that glass of wine or that tumbler of whisky.
And, much as a very fine wine is a very rare treat for most, so too is a fine cigar. Even your cigar aficionado smokes, on average, maybe a couple a month. They are typically smoked either at dedicated cigar clubs and in good company – where a cigar is found to be a spur to friendly conversation among all classes and creeds – or in blissfully self-imposed isolation – a ritual providing an hour of meditative calm that might even chime with the 21st century’s crazed fixation on wellness.
Cigar smokers of any age (and you’ll struggle to find a single teen) are not huddled on street corners, chugging them on the hour, every hour, out of dire necessity. They’re not contaminating parks and pubs – landlords seem all too ready to turn a blind eye to vaping – with chemically-ridden cotton candy clouds.
Perhaps our government simply does not understand that the cigar is a happy outlier in the tobacco world. Worse, perhaps the bill’s failure to exclude cigars is a consequence of snobbery – of looking down one’s smoke-free nostrils at the cigar’s dubious image. In popular imagination, the cigar was once considered the preserve of gangsters, revolutionaries and fat cat capitalists. With the Conservatives proposing the bill and Labour championing it, both sides would have found a nemesis on that list.
Much as a very fine wine is a very rare treat for most, so too is a fine cigar
Latterly, the cigar has unfortunately become the go-to prop of the manosphere, Andrew Tate and his sticky, icky ilk waving their typically big selection about as totems of their wealth and stand-ins for their lack of penile presence. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’ as Freud noted. Sometimes it really isn’t.
Naysayers may still offer the opinion that cigars are disgusting, wherever they’re smoked. People will rightly say that – tranquil pensiveness in every puff notwithstanding – they’re not exactly good for your health either. You might not inhale – at least not if you have any sense – but mouth cancer and heart disease can still kill you. That’s why we’ve long restricted access to tobacco products to those over 18, to those able to choose for themselves. Yet that’s a very different proposition from one that seeks to ensure that, eventually, nobody will have access to them. In a few decades or so, the tradition, refinement and art of the cigar will – at best – be driven into the corners of the black market or – at worst – be gone in a puff of smoke.
By all means, shove your fags and nic sticks there. Nobody savours those. Nobody collects them, celebrates with them or treasures time spent puffing on them. But cigars deserve to be saved from this legislation, even if it’s too much to hope that it might be repealed – as a similar law was in New Zealand in 2024. To not save them is another small but not insignificant attack on the enjoyment of life, the application of a heavy hand that seeks to denude our brief time here of all vices. Our politicians may be wise to remember that potentially extending a lifetime is not necessarily the same as improving it.
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