The progressive mania for regulating the lives of others is highly addictive.

[El Presidente]

"The progressive mania for regulating the lives of others is highly addictive."

Great line 

 

 

Killjoys want to stub out this guilty pleasure

Tobacco and Vapes Bill risks self-styled ‘public health’ lordships putting an end to the old-school charm of cigar lounges

Juliet Samuel

FULL LINK TO ARTICLE

Monday January 19 2026, 12.01am GMT, The Times

Ihave found a way to travel back in time and it’s by visiting a cigar lounge. The one I went to was small, wood-panelled and served by neat, attentive men in ties and jackets. The walls were lined with glass cases of the type a Victorian gentleman would use to display his butterflies but here were filled with perfect rows of cigars in their little gold-foil bands. On the wall hung a large portrait medallion of Sir Richard Grenville, the 16th-century explorer.

I’m not much of a smoker but I held on to a cigarillo for 20 minutes, puffing at it and talking about Lords reform, feeling briefly as if I were an Edwardian gentleman. In fact, the Lords is a topic of great contemporary relevance to a cigar lounge because of a recent attempt made by some of its most sententious members to ban these very places.

The vehicle was the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, that pernicious and unnecessary assault on liberty originally dreamt up by Rishi Sunak when he was prime minister and now revived, which the self-styled “public health” lordships tried to amend in November.

 

Cigar lounges operate on the basis of an exemption to the 2007 smoking ban, which, among its more moderate provisions, concedes that someone splashing out £800 on a luxury item ought to get a chance to sample the goods. So you can’t bring your own smokes; you can only visit to try before you buy from the lounge shop.

 

 

And because cigar pricing is more liberally regulated in Britain than on the Continent, London has become a hub for the luxury humidor tourist, keeping these little vignettes of old Europe alive. But the killjoys must have an outlet for their bloodlust.

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath, preaching in support of Lord Faulkner’s industry-killing amendment, begged the Lords to consider the health of the staff (those in the lounge I visited were, unsurprisingly, cigar connoisseurs) and the children (one lounge in Sheffield, she noted with horror, was actually “within 400 metres of a school”!).

Their attempt to protect local children from the irresistibly alluring pull of a £70 cigar being quietly smoked in a hideaway for old men failed this time. But I’m sure they’ll be back. The progressive mania for regulating the lives of others is highly addictive.

 

[Çnote]

Hear, hear! Pass the port, my good man!