Nicotine may have some deleterious and costly health effects, but so do winter sports, mountaineering, motorcycling and many other activities we leave to personal choice. (I have never been asked to work on a government anti-skiing campaign, though if the opportunity arose I would happily volunteer my services for free.)

But it is absurd that vaping is now the target of much more opprobrium than alcohol. I suspect part of the explanation can be found in an HM Government health warning which appeared on cigarette packets in the 1980s: ‘Most Doctors Don’t Smoke.’ Indeed so. Most doctors don’t vape either. But, in my experience, doctors drink a lot. (The idea of taking lifestyle advice from the medical establishment seems absurd to anyone who has witnessed the behaviour of medical students.)

Boozy doctors seem to overlook abundant nightly evidence from A&E which reveals that alcohol is much the larger social problem. No one starts a fight or crashes a car because they have vaped too much. Nicotine may alter mood, but it does not create antisocial or dangerous behaviour. (When my daughters were at university, somewhere at number 473 on my list of worries was that they might take up vaping.)

The same blindness may apply to politicians, who seem to enjoy a drinking culture unchanged from the 1970s.

The switch from smoking to vaping by millions of people is something we should be cautiously celebrating. Britain, which regulated vaping to a far lesser degree than many countries, has – along with snus-chewing Sweden – the lowest smoking rates in Europe. Go into any vape shop and you will see many people who, after years of failed quit-attempts, have finally found a way out. Many of these people are visibly not rich – and so are also freed from a level of taxation on cigarettes which was borderline unethical when many remaining smokers were poor and lacked an alternative.

The fact that nicotine is now rather a down-market drug is not irrelevant here. Many of the ‘consultations’ on banning various vaping products seem to have taken place between middle-class politicians and medical experts who have never smoked and never vaped. Not all their ideas were wrong. But some suggest they truly don’t understand how vaping works. One regulation I objected to, for instance, was the rule that vaping should be banned everywhere smoking is banned. This forces vapers to huddle outside with smokers, exposing them to temptation. It is why you don’t hold AA meetings in a pub.

Restrictions on the sale of disposable vapes seem sensible – though you could simply restrict their sale to vape shops and, say, pubs, which have a strong incentive not to sell to those who are underage. I suspect many corner shops have found the sale of disposable vapes to be too valuable to police too tightly. Allowing the sale of disposables in pubs would help rescue Britain’s pubs, while making the products widely available only to over-18s. Widespread distribution matters: adults who cannot easily buy vaping products may relapse into smoking if their battery dies.

But the ban on flavours – other than tobacco, mint, menthol and ‘fruit’ – is insane, and suggests the people involved in the consultation have not spoken to vapers at all. It is the migration away from tobacco flavours that makes vaping lastingly effective as a means of quitting. First of all, after a few weeks of vaping strawberry ice-cream, say, a conventional cigarette tastes gross. In behavioural terms, this is a big win. A couple of hours in a vape shop would also reveal that most ex-smokers consume different vape flavours in what they call ‘a rotation’. They have a repertoire of acceptable flavours between which they alternate to keep things interesting. Oddly, this is completely different to people’s smoking behaviour, where they were often slavishly loyal to one brand of cigarette.

Provided this flavour ban is voted down, I would happily accept that vape packaging should not be designed to appeal to children. Even if that means my plan to launch a range of Peppa Pig bacon-flavoured vapes must now be shelved indefinitely. Ah, well!