Nigel Farage's cigarettes are often depicted as one of the most appealing things about him. To date, his deployment of crafty or, occasionally, cheeky ciggies, while all around him conform to public health advice, has been a remarkably well-received token of his libertarian vision. Of course, his constant smoking is, first and foremost, a little guy demonstration that he is nothing like professional politicians – NB E Milband, D Cameron – who rarely invest in anything more than a lager to advertise their human DNA. At the same time, Farage reaches out to the kind of smokers who feel persecuted by puritans trying to deny them fancy packaging and the ancient Hippocratic right, when hospitalised, to be wheeled out with their drips for a fag. So he wins the lung-damaged vote.
But every time mischievous Nige sucks, like some well-trained beagle, on another public snout, we are also treated to a strong, visual hint to Ukip's position on everything from obesity action (against), speeding (poop-poop) and drink pricing (are you having a laugh?) to lap dancing and prostitution (woof). Even if obese people and excessive drinkers occasionally worry about their prospects, it seems fair to assume that Farage has the sociopathic drivers' vote in the bag, along with those of Europhobic sex workers and their johns, ditto sex traffickees, no doubt, when they too become enfranchised.
True, some libertarian ideals are too complicated to convey with a simple cigarette. Until recently, it was left to Ukip's Godfrey Bloom to extrapolate, as never before, the implications of feminist busybodies on an Englishman's God-given right to do as he pleases in his own kitchen, supposing this causes no harm to another human being. Again, explaining its opposition to same-sex marriage has been a fairly tricky business for Ukip, requiring – if I understand it correctly – libertarian sympathies to be transferred to the faith groups who might be denied expression of their traditional bigotry. Even one Ukip official, its youth chairman Olly Neville, found this too challenging, and was sacked.
Though more straightforward to manage, the ostentatious smoking is a risk for Farage and not only in actuarial terms. His shortened life expectancy might be considered such an idiotically high price to pay for convenient, libertarian shorthand, particularly for a man who has survived both cancer and a terrifying plane crash, as to make him, with his reckless disregard for health outcomes, unfit for public office.
But all credit to Mr Farage, his willingness to blow smoke in his interviewers' faces has so far been a triumph and not, it appears, simply because of widespread indifference about his lifespan. Contrast with the routinely unkind chronicling of, say, Kate Moss's relationship with nicotine the tolerance with which profile writers have commented on Farage's more disarming addiction, his "smell of tobacco" and the "miasma of cigarette smoke" he inhabits.
Indulgence has reached the point where Farage feels emboldened to advertise this lovable flaw as one of his noblest attributes. In a week when research published in the journal Thorax showed that 600 children start smoking every day, Farage took to the pages of the Independent to raise the alarm about the forgotten casualties as we witness "another attempt by the government to force cigarettes into plain packages".
Please, at this time of peace and goodwill, will no one think of the cigarettes? In all likelihood, he wrote, we should just see more suffering, as packaging "will open the flood gates for counterfeit cigarettes" – one pictures them as small, rectangular Bulgarians – "to submerge the market". Some of these illegal cigarette incomers, apparently, are linked to terrorists, "including those involved in killing and maiming British troops for money".
Regardless of smokers' lifespans, Farage argues, the government should stay away from our health, which "adults should be able to decide for ourselves". And here it comes: "As I'm sure many people realise, I am quite a keen smoker. I've always prized myself at being rather good at it." Support plain packaging and, as well as killing British soldiers, you give succour to Nigel's enemies: "the 'health campaigners' and assorted health fascists".
If fascist seems a strong word to apply to people such as Dr Nicholas Hopkinson, author of the above research and a supporter of plain packaging, Farage is said to know whereof he speaks. As a pupil at Dulwich College, Channel 4 discovered, Farage's views were such that, when teachers discussed his fitness to be a prefect, one said the boy was "a fascist, but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect". Farage has denied a contemporaneous report, from the same source, that he once marched with combined cadet force companions through a quiet Sussex village "shouting Hitler Youth songs".
As Nick Clegg has argued, these discretions, if they happened, belong to the past. More troubling, surely, is Farage's current belief, as a would-be prefect, that anyone committed to improving public health is a fascist – by which he presumably means statist, intolerant and authoritarian – and as such almost as bad as Ukip's more familiar "nanny state", which, being female as well as bossy, is infinitely worse than the "paternalist" epithet it replaced. The Conservative MP Iain Macleod is credited by the OED with coining "nanny state" in 1965, since when the term has been in continual, opprobrious use by Tories, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, who shares a deep bond with his nanny; Lady Rawlings, who has just proposed the distribution of electric blankets; and David Cameron, who nonetheless hopes to protect Britain from chocolate oranges and online pornography, inebriation and gambling.
The great attraction for the Tories of Nudge, the somewhat tarnished wheeze for achieving behavioural change without compulsion, was that it absolved the government of nannying. Andrew Lansley, tasked with improving health, said : "Rather than nannying people we will nudge them by working with the industry to make healthy lifestyles easier." As it turns out, an expert has identified a "public health timebomb" and child obesity is an epidemic: unsurprising given the undiminished promotion of life-shortening food and government laissez-faire. Nudge policies, one critic, Alberto Salazar, argues, may "endanger the lives of millions that may die as result of unstoppable unhealthy eating while waiting for nudges to work".
Common sense, a quality on which Ukip likes to think it has a monopoly, dictates that no responsible politician would use "health campaigner" as a term of abuse, or not when surveys have indicated public appreciation of health interventions.
When Farage argues for zero interference by the nanny state, this inevitably makes him an unhealth campaigner – for lung cancer, for obesity and for an epidemic of diabetes, not forgetting his party's enthusiasm for higher speed limits, thereby adding thousands more to Ukip's morbidity targets. Why Farage should be 100% in love with easeful death is anyone's guess, but, for pure, cautionary value, he could still be the best thing to happen to the nanny state since the foundation of the NHS.
