Terence Blacker: Why can't I smoke and be merry?

It was a scene that has probably been enacted in varying forms this week in houses across the country. At a moment of post-prandial contentment, the householder lit up a Christmas cigar. A couple of puffs in, he was asked with all the ice-cold moral authority a 12-year-old girl can muster - that is, a lot - to put it out.

It was a request, or rather a command, that by all contemporary standards of respect and public health was entirely justified. The child in question is sweet, kind and intelligent; the smoker (me) would generally be regarded in this context as a foul-smelling, selfish adult prepared to poison his nearest and dearest for the sake of a half-corona.

The protest was hardly a surprise. For the past two or three decades, schools have rightly seen it as part of their moral brief to inculcate an awareness of the dangers of tobacco addiction. Parents have been harangued by their little ones; cigarettes destroyed, flushed down the loo.

Recently the battlefront has widened. Tobacco has come to be regarded as more than simply harmful. It is disgusting, anti-social, an act of slow murder perpetrated on the innocent by self-indulgent addicts. With the ban on smoking in public places, a new tone of shrill rage has entered the discussion. The mildest defence of smokers will provoke emails of a crazed, emotional, foul-mouthed intemperance comparable only to communications from animal rights activists.

Suddenly the debate is about more than health. It concerns the rights of the community as opposed to those of the citizen. Tobacco's perceived offensiveness has changed subtly from being a menace to others to becoming emblematic of selfishness - or, as the other side would put it, individualism - in a world which should be essentially unselfish, or communitarian. As with the hunting issue, there is a niggling sense that what most enrages opponents is not so much the sin itself, as the pleasure taken in it.

There is something alarming about the degree of anger and panic that now surrounds the smoking debate, and more than a whiff of bullying. The health-loving majority would like cigarettes to be removed from films. Smokers who gather like dissidents outside office doors will shortly be moved on by the authorities for reasons that remain mysterious. So far as the National Health Service is concerned, smokers are already regarded as second-class patients.

The problem is that smoking is still legal, and earns the government huge tax revenue. If there really is something uniquely immoral and repugnant about tobacco, it should be put outside the law. While it remains part of daily life, and yet provokes people into socially condoned acts of illiberal behaviour, it is clear that the argument is about more than the issue itself. Once the moral superiority of the majority, and its consequent right to bully less perfect citizens, is generally accepted, then other anti-social activities - drinking and obesity, for a start - will soon follow.

I did not stub out my Christmas cigar, and nor did I smoke it outside, cold and hunched in shame, in the garden. I realise that, for many readers, those puffs will make me the worst kind of pantomime villain for the season, that they will be wishing me future Christmases that are smoky and alone. But my young friend and I agreed to disagree.

How about this for a New Year's resolution? I resolve to allow others the right to be different from me.

A toxic brand of humour

Britain's unfunniest comedian Jimmy Carr was hosting a comedy quiz this week.

At one point, the team were shown the famous photograph of Alexander Litvinenko in the final phase of radiation poisoning.

Jimmy asked the teams who it was. "And I'll give you a clue," he quipped. "It isn't Kojak." There followed a knockabout routine in which it was discussed whether the plasters on the Russian were in fact condoms.

Litvinenko was murdered just over a month ago, at about the same time as the first two victims of the Ipswich murderer. Would the brave satirists of Channel Four have regarded them as suitable comic material?

With East Europeans, as Sasha Baron Cohen has proved, any joke, however cruel and bigoted, is acceptable.

* 'Tis the season to be holier than thou, and so perhaps one should not be too surprised by the froth of sanctimonious outrage that has attended the Blair family's stay in the Florida house of Bee Gee.

What makes the row in the press unusually bogus is that it is the media, with its great obsession with unauthorised snaps of the famous on holiday, that obliged the Prime Minister once more to avail himself of the high-security facilities of a pop star.

Thanks to the Bee Gee, we shall probably be deprived of photographs revealing how much weight Blair has gained, or how much cellulite Cherie has on her thighs. It will be a tough few days, but at this time of the year there are lots other celebrities on holiday, looking old, uncomfortable, silly or amorous. The press will have to make their lives a misery instead.