What has Rishi Sunak’s government achieved in its first year? The highlights include a renegotiated Brexit policy and setting more practical net-zero deadlines. But Sunak asked the country to judge him on his ability to deliver his pledges set out at the start of the year. If polls are to be believed, voters are preparing to do just that. Inflation is falling, but that’s largely due to interest rate hikes announced by the Bank of England. The economy is growing, but barely. The NHS waiting list keeps rising – 7.6 million now in England alone. On this last point, no doubt the six-figure salaried consultants who keep striking deserve part of the blame. But to say the Sunak government is struggling to make good on its promises would be putting it rather gently.

Still, it occurs to me that there is a more recent policy proposal that is already having an effect, certainly on my life, though perhaps not in the way the government intended. It’s thanks to Sunak’s latest plan to ban smoking for future generations that I had a cigarette for the first time in almost ten years.

It was not a decision I made lightly. I’ve never been a smoker. The few puffs on cigarettes I tried as a teenager left me dizzy and uninterested. On the evening of my 24th birthday, I decided that I wasn’t much of a libertarian if I didn’t give smoking a proper go. It wasn’t my brightest idea. Still, I tried. Five cigarettes made me violently sick for the next two days.

I don’t know why I thought this experiment would end well. Nothing fun agrees with me. At 19, my poor dad had to pick me up from a friend’s house at midnight when I tried her joint. ‘Dad, I’m dying,’ I sobbed over the phone. He started to panic until I explained I took three hits. He laughed and told me to eat some ice cream while he drove to pick me up. It was good advice I was unable to act on, as my panic and paranoia had me seeing four of everything.

I drink, but have never tried, or wanted, to test this past moderation. I switched to decaf in my early twenties because coffee was making me crazy and giving me the shakes. It’s still a toss-up as to whether a multivitamin on an empty stomach will make me sick. I’m just grateful that, despite my failed attempts to misbehave, I became a liberal who wants people to live freely, rather than becoming part of the distressingly large proportion of the British public (25 per cent!) who told pollsters at the end of lockdown that they wanted nightclubs to stay permanently closed.

Three weeks ago, I was sitting on the Eurostar to Paris, reflecting on the Prime Minister’s grand idea to create a second tier of legal rights for adults, when I decided that liberal sentiments were not enough. The miserable policy inspired action – some kind of act of solidarity with future grown-ups. I hopped off the train at the Gare du Nord and picked up a pack of Vogue L’Originale Bleue at the first Tabac I could find.

Later, after a long lunch with a friend at Paris’s friendliest restaurant, Chez Fernand Christine, we wandered around tipsy, until we landed upon a beautiful café. I pulled out my Vogues. Looking around at the streets and the fellow patrons, it was clear to me why David Hockney – who has spent his life fleeing ‘boring, stifling’ and nannying places – settled in France. It’s a culture that seems to judge people less – in restaurants, at least.

My friend told me she was just as furious with Sunak’s ban, which was a relief to hear, as polling earlier this year suggested that half the British public support an ‘all out ban’ on smoking. It’s the kind of authoritarian impulse you’d hope a Conservative party – which loves to bandy the word ‘freedom’ around when it suits them – would reject. Yet successive Tory governments have worked hard, for 13 years, to come up with ways to make life less affordable and less fun – the sugar tax is an obvious example.

The proposed smoking ban might be the government’s biggest overreach yet, Covid rules notwithstanding. In fact, the same kind of flawed reasoning that led to nonsensical Covid rules is behind the smoking ban. When he was chancellor, Sunak lamented the faulty assumptions behind Sage modelling. Yet the models for his smoking ban use the same tricks: unexplained assumptions that don’t reflect current trends are fed into the model, and ‘all scenarios’ assume the policy is needed to eradicate smoking.

The great irony is that the government doesn’t need to manipulate the numbers: smoking rates are at their lowest on record, especially among the young. Everyone knows smoking is dangerous. Ministers are quite right to say there is no healthy level of cigarette consumption. The same goes for fried pickles, Jägerbombs and men who won’t commit. It’s not hard to imagine that future leaders might see Sunak’s ban as a playbook for how to start banning whatever they don’t like.

It’s a tragedy that both the Tories and Labour now think that the role of government is to turn politicians’ pet peeves into nationwide bans. I hope the next generation of adults goes smoke-free, but that should be their decision to make. I unwrapped the box, lit a Vogue, and took a few drags. It was delicious. It felt sharp in my chest. I passed out an hour later.<//>