Inside Number 10: the politics behind the smoking ban

I felt some pride but also some regret when I saw the Tobacco and Vapes Act reach the statute book. 

Pride, because I was part of Rishi Sunak’s administration which introduced this landmark win for health – but regret because we ultimately failed to pass it into law. Its history, though, offers lessons to all who are committed to the cause of public health. 

The first lesson is that truly transformative public health measures must be driven by the prime minister. Even though the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) can normally be relied upon to make the case, there are other legitimate interests to take account of – the High Street, pubs, the creative industries, the public finances (and more) – and the structure of Whitehall means that these interests are represented by more departments than the health interest. It takes a prime minister to side with health.  

The second lesson is that prime ministers seem to gravitate towards public health measures when they have nothing left to lose – either because they are reaching the end of their tenure, or because they are deeply unpopular. Think Tony Blair with the ban on smoking in public places, or Theresa May on childhood obesity. Rishi Sunak’s announcement was in the same vein: as the peerless Deborah Arnott observed, it was a long shot. I have no idea whether any of these prime ministers were thinking of their legacy when they took forward these policies, but it seems plausible. So, public health campaigners, time your efforts.  

This second lesson leads to a third lesson, which is that – and I am sorry to be so stark – public health restrictions are deeply politically risky. Although Siva Anandaciva’s excellent 2024 blog is correct to say they end up being rapidly accepted, there is a difference between knowing this will happen eventually and burning the political capital to make it happen in the first place – particularly when your party’s right flank is crumbling because of the electoral appeal of a man having a fag outside a boozer in Clacton. 

Back in 2023, many of Rishi Sunak’s advisers were deeply nervous – and rightly so. So when I raised my head inside Number 10 to support an early effort by DHSC to open a debate on the generational ban – a ban strongly backed by Chris Whitty, whose advocacy never wavered – half a dozen of them promptly shot it off. (I’d like to say I thought about battling through them to test the prime minister’s view directly, but I did not – and we duly asked DHSC to rule out any changes on age-of-sale.) 

The idea, however, did not die – principally because, in Eleanor Shawcross and Nin Pandit, who led on policy and who were in the discussions where the unthinkable could be thought, it had some formidable champions. 

And then, over the summer of 2023, Rishi himself made his view clear. 

The basic job of a political adviser – indeed anyone – in Number 10 is to protect the prime minister, and finding a way to implement his instruction whilst avoiding the collapse of his administration did seem tricky. But I remembered, because I was there, that in 2006 the Conservative Party navigated itself through similarly tricky internal politics on the ban on smoking in public places by unwhipping its MPs. Credit for establishing that precedent goes to Andrew Lansley, and Rishi Sunak duly followed it. 

This leads to the fourth lesson, about which I have written before: free-voting public health legislation is a way to secure progress on public health – because on a free vote politicians tend to be more enlightened than government and party politics would otherwise allow them to be. 

One caveat. I tried to persuade the chief whip that any free vote should be contained to a simple go/no-go decision on a generational ban. This would have limited any internal splits to a single event and incidentally helped to protect the integrity of the rest of the bill. But Simon Hart judged – undoubtedly correctly – that the entire bill would have to be free-voted to manage the parliamentary party.  

The legislation team in Number 10 was aghast, fearing the prospect of any number of wild measures being voted into government legislation whilst the government left itself defenceless. I was ultimately persuaded by them that the end-result would likely prove calamitous – but we all agreed that the process would, at least, be fun. 

We never got the chance to fully test this. In early 2024, as it is prone to doing, Number 10 wobbled and we briefly delayed the introduction of the bill. That delay proved fatal when Rishi Sunak called the election early, because the bill had not reached far enough in the legislative process to pass into law. I spent my last morning in Downing Street trying to find a way through, with what felt like the entire DHSC on my case – but to no avail. Having resigned myself to failure, I left the building for the last time. 

After the election, the Labour government took it forward. History will give them the credit for doing so. But I hope Rishi Sunak’s role is remembered as more than just a footnote, because his courage warrants it. ‘He’s going to get booed’, one of his top lieutenants vented when the plan to announce the generational ban at party conference materialised, causing me to submit fresh advice noting that we could also simply start a broad public debate on whether to ban smoking and let the politics catch up (akin to what happened in 2006). Rishi Sunak, not short of conviction, roundly rejected it, and we cracked on. It was an extraordinary act of political leadership.  

But the final lesson is this: no politician runs onto the battlefield on their own (even if, at times, they find all their allies have run back off). It is the collective work of public health campaigners that created the conditions in which the generational ban was announced, and in which it ultimately passed.  

I said we wobbled in early 2024 – but we ultimately decided to proceed. And the reason why is that we thought about the dangers of Nigel Farage and some nefarious colleagues conspiring to oppose us, and we thought about the massed ranks of doctors, clinicians, charities, and campaigners ranged against them, and we knew who would win.