Il capo is ageing. The hair is greying, the waist grows thicker. Nor is the family at peace. Gordon, his own “con amore”, is splurging cash from the bank job. Ruth screwed up on the schools racket and had to be rescued by Adonis, “il barone”. Tessa blew the casino syndicate and the speakeasy licence scam.

She risks losing the family big money. Now his favourite, Patricia, gets beaten up by the northside mob over the nicotine shakedown. Il capo knows his weakness — it is for the girls. But they were good girls. Now they are all arguing over the dinner table. There is bad blood in the family.

In truth, last week’s cabinet bust-up over pub smoking was a rare moment of sanity in Tony Blair’s government. For once Downing Street did not crack the whip to get its way. For the first time in eight years the cabinet seemed to be doing its job. It discussed something before making a decision. True, it leaked all over the place, but that was novelty talking. Besides, where someone smokes in a pub is hardly an earth-shaking matter. Some might wonder if it is a government-shaking matter either.

There is no better place to study state intrusion on personal freedom than in a pub. Why can’t I go down the road and get a drink and a smoke whenever I want, asks Joe Citizen? His friend answers, because you make a mess and a noise. You get drunk and you die of cancer and my taxes have to pick up the pieces. Tough, cries Joe Citizen. You do things that cost me money, like drive, get fat and have children. You get off my back and I’ll get off yours. Otherwise let’s live and let live — or at least let’s hack a compromise.

That in a nutshell was the argument last week in cabinet. I imagine it was repeated in every pub in the land. This was not passive politics. It was politics lit, smoked, inhaled and blown in every face and was all the better for it. Nor was the outcome as absurd as critics have portrayed.

Smoking with food is unpleasant to almost everyone. Legislate to avoid it. Blowing smoke in other people’s faces at the bar is nasty. Discourage it. But sitting with friends over a pint and a cigarette, an experience enjoyed by millions, is hardly a ricin attack on the nation state.

Every pub has an interest in accommodating smokers and non-smokers. Let regulation nudge the free market in a particular direction, but nudge is the operative word. That appears to be the government position, as of last week.

The modern state has two responses to any perceived vice. One is to set minimum standards of health and information and operate policy accordingly. This is reflected in variable taxes on consumption. In recent decades cigarette sales have fallen as taxes have risen, while alcohol sales have risen as taxes have fallen.

This government has wanted to penalise smoking but encourage drinking, in part because (like any “Tory” government) it loves brewers and in part to discourage drug use among the young. In the latter case the policy has failed.

The absence of any fiscal regulation of drugs has sent prices plummeting and consumption soaring.

So much for a regulated free market. Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, sees these things differently. Her response to a social evil is to ban it. She wanted an outright ban on all smoking in enclosed places. I have no doubt that she would like to ban smoking in public parks, beaches, pavements, dinner parties, therapy sessions and houses occupied by children. She is already banning half the school menus in England. Just as nobody is as right wing as a former communist, so nobody is as dirigiste as a lapsed libertarian. Why as health secretary she is so tough on nicotine but so lax on alcohol, cannabis and hard drugs is a mystery.

Last week others in cabinet, said to include the prime minister, the foreign secretary and the defence secretary, reacted to Hewitt with what was for them a sudden and astonishing concern for individual freedom. Smoking might be offensive and cost the National Health Service billions, they apparently said, but so what? It saves the NHS billions by killing smokers young. Lots of things are unpleasant and unhealthy which we do not ban, from hamburgers and alcopops to jet skis and Oasis.

Smoky pubs are not prisons. Attendance in them is not compulsory. Let liberty reign, cried Blair and his friends, as if about to charge naked round the cabinet room and draw deep on a spliff.

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