IF FAGS are so evil that they must be hidden beneath the counter then why doesn't the Government, or any government, simply ban them outright?

Firstly the politicians simply haven't the guts. They're terrified of both negative publicity and the merest risk that militant smokers might just summon enough ballot box muscle to cost them a seat or three. Certainly more Craven A than AV.

Then there's the £10.5bn in taxes, including VAT, they'd be spurning by imposing a total ban. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is currently expending almost as many resources on cigarette smugglers as it does on drug trafficking, because its political masters really can't bear the thought of any tax going untrousered.

Personally, queuing in a newsagent's and idly checking the price of a packet of 20 merely reminds me that the 80-a-day I was smoking when my heart abruptly ordered me to desist would now be costing in excess of 200 quid-a-week. Forget the cardiac unit, had I kept that up I'd have needed a career change into bonus-bagging corporate banking or life as an MP with a purposely confusing number of homes.

That said, I soberly recall an aunt who ultimately succumbed to lung cancer requesting jokingly, her laughter disintegrating into a hacking cough, that someone pass her another coffin nail.

Ironically, while our Coalition dummies spent 13 years blowing raspberries at the nanny state of Blair-Brown Labour, how fascinating that they're now so keen to drive nails into the coffin of those cornershop owners, newsagents and sub-postmasters to whom they were offering the earth barely a year ago.

Incidentally, don't think the sub-postmasters will go down without a fight when they discover the Coalition's got every intention of continuing Labour's EU-inspired mission to strip them of even the least lucrative of their remaining functions.

But once they're also forced to label every item of food and drink with doomsday warnings, they'll have little choice but to shut their doors and redirect us towards some giant aircraft hangar alongside the M4.

Perhaps putting dire warnings on fag packets, whose appearance is now almost as interesting as William Hague's voice, never worked for the simple reason that half the population's illiterate.

But isn't it curious that many advocates of under-the-counter fags are the same people who have convinced themselves that legalising cannabis, cocaine and heroin, and selling them off the shelf will reverse the nation's drug addiction epidemic?