WHEN Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, was a schoolgirl I don’t imagine that she was ever invited behind the bike sheds for an after-class smoke; or indeed for anything else. So perhaps it’s the privations of childhood that explain the latest sinister twist in the Government’s war on tobacco. I say Government, but inevitably the European Commission casts its grubby shadow over proceedings.

So what are they up to now? Well the technocrats have set up a groovy new website, packwarnings.nhs.uk/index.aspx, the point of which is to get the public to e-mail in its views on which would make the most garish photographs to be stuck on cigarette packs. There are the usual horror stories, with lots of rotting teeth and X-rays of lungs with black patches all over them. Altogether there are 42 images to chose from, the most “popular” 14 of which will be coming to a cigarette packet near you.

Some cynics might scoff that it’s a bit rich coming from a Government that is considering implementing “shooting galleries” where heroin addicts can shoot up at the taxpayers expense. But that’s new Labour for you.

Clearly, the idea that we are all adults capable of making decisions for ourselves is one quite alien to the powers-that-be. Believing that we the public are complete idiots who need the benefit of their infinite wisdom is, I suspect, the only thing that keeps them going.

So why don’t they just go ahead, and make the whole wretched practice illegal? After all, either smoking is so bad for us that it should be banned outright, or it should be accepted as an expression of personal choice and cigarette manufacturers ought to be allowed to advertise them as attractively and as favourably as any other product.

Instead, we get this mealy-mouthed process of semi-persecution. No other products get treated like this. Burger cartons don’t come equipped with photos of ultrabuttocked civilians waddling down the street, cracking the pavements. Neither are condom packets plastered with pictures of Rock Hudson on his death bed.

So why not just do it? Certainly, there are practical problems. The prisons are full. And the Home Office can hardly be relied upon to deport any foreigner seen with a packet of Gauloises stuck in his back pocket. But I’m sure the odd ASBO might work.