My heart leapt last week upon hearing that the Tory mayoral candidate Boris Johnson had pledged to hold a referendum on the smoking ban if he were elected on May 1.

In a web chat with The Sun, Johnson, a nonsmoker, said: “If I had my way, we would have an online referendum in London about whether to give boroughs back the power to give discretion over smoking to pubs and clubs.”

It then turned out that he had received “between £5,000 and £10,000” for a speech to the Tobacco Association last year (would having made a paid speech to the Friends of Cats organisation have disqualified him from having opinions about dog poo on the capital’s streets?), and that anyway it wasn’t in the mayor’s power to hold referendums.

Which is a real shame because the smoking ban is killing social life and killing the businesses of those who try to provide it.

It truly amazes me that we are free to give ourselves cirrhosis of the liver 24 hours a day from teenagehood upwards; that we are free to eat any amount of toxic, obesity-causing carcinogenic nastiness - at vast future cost to the health service - and to feed it to our children so that they have double chins by the time they’re six; but that as free, adult human beings we are not able to light up in public because nanny says it’s naughty.

It’s like being a giant toddler. We are turning into a nation of adult babies. It really does beggar belief, as does the fact that our nose-poking, interfering, finger-wagging nanny state couldn’t find anything more pressing to preoccupy itself with - like, I don’t know, gun crime, dead teenagers, pregnant children, alcohol abuse of epidemic proportions - than adults enjoying the odd fag.

It’s nearly 10 months since the smoking ban began in England and I still feel outraged by it every day. And time won’t make it better: I was in New York last week - technically smoke-free since 2003 - and every other person was outside on the street, or the roof or the fire escape smoking. At one point during lunch half the restaurant got up and went outside while the other half sat about twiddling their thumbs and looking fed up - as well they might - and waiters stood around with plates of cooling food.

If you smoke, cigarettes punctuate a meal: going without is like trying to speak without pauses. The whole thing is so mad: I had lunch outside last Sunday and couldn’t smoke because I was under the restaurant’s awning. The kind owner moved my chair by two inches and lo - I could chain-smoke for all eternity. In what kind of weird universe does this make any sense?

What has the result been here? Misery, gloom, pub closures, drastically diminished profits for publicans and bar owners at a time when they can scarcely afford them, and the restless feeling that we’ve all had enough of being told what to do and that something’s going to give.

Sure, some people have stopped smoking, which is nice for them and probably decreases future costs to the NHS. Heart disease, though, is the biggest killer in Britain and I don’t see the government banning people from sitting around on their great big arses guzzling fluorescent fizzy drinks and eating chips all day.

Having spent some time in London’s main heart and lung hospital, I can tell you there’s not much in it. Stop smoking all you like, but if you eat crap and you aren’t keen on moving then you aren’t going to have a healthy old age. There’s more than one way of clogging an artery.

It is now impossible to have a proper lunch or supper with a smoker, because the smoker will constantly interrupt the conversation to go and have a smoke outside; even when they’re physically present you get the annoying feeling they’re not fully concentrating because they’re thinking about cigarettes.

Unless your friends and colleagues are all, improbably, nonsmokers this makes an ordinary appointment or evening out the social equivalent of coitus interruptus.

Naturally this is extremely irritating for the nonsmokers, left to stare into space while their companions scoot outside. The smokers don’t find being huddled in the rain, breathing in the pollution as well as the nicotine, particularly enchanting either.

Of course, as you head into the restaurant or train station or place of work or cafe or pub - or pretty much anywhere at all - you’ll first have to negotiate a tunnel of fug so intense that you can pretty much guarantee the insistent smell of smoke will lodge itself in your clothes and hair, to a far greater extent than it might have done had you chosen to sit in the nonsmoking section.

If that wasn’t enough, pubs and bars have also started smelling revolting. I’ll grant you that the scent of cigarette smoke is not to everyone’s taste, but it was at least doing a good job of masking the smell of stale beer, body odour, overpowering scent and cheese and onion crisp breath. And pubs are half empty: everyone’s out on the pavement smoking or not bothering with the pub in the first place and sitting at home with their fags and cheap booze.

The same applies to restaurants: I’ve gone from eating out three or four times a week to either having people round at home or going to their houses because I like a cigarette with my wine or my coffee. And I’m a grown-up so I’ll make my own choices.

This rise in entertaining at home, incidentally, is having the unforeseen and unpleasant effect of filling people’s houses with smoke: the kind of social smokers who would never dream of lighting up anywhere near their children are now forced to do so. Not quite what nanny had in mind, surely?

Anyway, Boris has my vote, even if a hypothetical referendum on the ban cannot come to pass - I like him for thinking of it and for saying it, and maybe if he becomes mayor he will be able to bring it under his remit. He’s a kick in the teeth to all busybody killjoys, to anyone whose sole ambition in life is to boss you and I into a sort of one-size-fits-all grey, anodyne, malleable mush.

And I like him for being honourable enough not to wheel out his wife to refute the absurd accusations of racism that have been levelled at him - she is half Sikh, for heaven’s sake, and his children are a quarter Indian.

It’s pathetic, although not half as pathetic as the erosion of our civil liberties. There’s a death knell tolling over London and - put it this way - I don’t think it’s for nicotine.

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