Pulling a sweater from a drawer the other day, the smell of smoke took me by surprise. It was only wood smoke, a legacy of pandemic socialising this freezing spring, when huddling around a garden bonfire was the only way of seeing friends. But it took me back decades, to the years when every night out meant coming home reeking of cigarettes, and every house party left a trail of beer bottles stuffed with fag ends floating in their ashy soup of dregs. Everyone smoked when I was growing up, pretty much everywhere. People lit up routinely on the bus, dads chain-smoked in cars all down the motorway to wherever you were going on holiday, and sweetshops sold candy cigarettes for little kids to pretend-smoke in the playground. The past is a foreign country, and sometimes better that way. But are we ready to consign it completely to history? Oxfordshire county council recently unveiled plans to become the first county in England to go officially smoke-free – meaning fewer than 5% of locals smoking, down from 10% now – by 2025. Its aim of discouraging people from taking fag breaks even on the pavement outside offices, or in parks or in their own cars, seems doomed at first sight; councils have few legal powers to enforce such things, and a libertarian Tory government seems unlikely to grant new ones. The smokers’ rights organisation Forest is already protesting that it’s “no business of local councils if adults choose to smoke” – although technically speaking that’s exactly whose business it has been ever since David Cameron moved public health budgets from the NHS to local government. Yet the time may be riper than it looks for a form of voluntary ban that is perhaps peculiarly British: exploiting smokers’ own innate embarrassment about a habit the majority want to quit. Half of smokers in 2010 thought the government was going too far in trying to make them stop, but a YouGov poll for the anti-smoking organisation Ash this week found that had fallen to 19% agreeing, with almost one in four thinking ministers could do more. Resistance, it seems, is running out of puff. When my son started playing in an Oxfordshire village football team eight years ago, his coach would stand on the touchline bellowing instructions with a pint in hand, while spectators sneaked a crafty fag. Now club policy across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire youth leagues is for smoke-free sidelines, with parents who insist on lighting up asked to do so furtively out of sight so that children don’t grow up thinking it’s normal. It’s a similar story at school gates nationwide, with headteachers increasingly asking parents not to smoke while waiting to collect their kids. Whether or not it’s actually legally enforceable, insisting on your inalienable right to make children skip out of class through a cloud of carcinogens feels socially awkward to say the least. And now such tactics are reaching adult playgrounds too. Smoking is banned on beaches from Barcelona in Spain to Veneto in Italy, on the grounds that nobody likes swimming in floating fag butts; Newcastle and Middlesbrough have outlawed smoking in outdoor dining areas. This year the Welsh government banned smoking outside hospitals, schools and daycare settings, and in children’s playgrounds. What separates these fresh-air bans from the 2007 prohibition on smoking in pubs, restaurants and workplaces is that they’re less about stopping innocent bystanders getting lung cancer than signalling social disapproval of smoking – or, as Oxfordshire’s director of public health Ansaf Azhar says, “creating an environment in which not smoking is encouraged” – while offering more medical support for those keen to quit. The fewer places smokers feel comfortable indulging, and the more the habit is pushed to the margins, the closer that 5% target looks. Since tobacco-related diseases may have killed more people over the past year than Covid, some will wonder if even that goes far enough. The greatest health risk to children comes from parents smoking over them at home, not having a stressed-out fag by the swings, so why not ban that instead of tinkering at the edges? The practical and political difficulties of enforcing prohibition inside private homes, however, make Oxfordshire’s “softly softly” approach a more viable model. For Big Tobacco’s great weakness is that unlike booze, sex, cake and other vices of which public health specialists despair, smoking isn’t actually much fun in and of itself. Strip away the cultural associations ingeniously built up around it – through advertising and sponsorship and and gratuitous smoking on television, all now outlawed – and it’s just the grim, faintly needy satisfying of an addict’s craving. My friends and I coughed determinedly through our first fags because we thought it made us look older, wilder, more sophisticated: a bit Kate Moss. But teenage rebellion has moved on from hanging out of your bedroom window with a Silk Cut, and the biggest fall in smoking prevalence over the last decade was among 18- to 24-year-olds. The young increasingly either vape instead, or see smoking as for old people – about as wild as a pipe and slippers. And what the tobacco industry arguably never wanted us to find out is that without the illusion of glamour or the sheen of rebellion, there’s nothing much left. Just a stinking ashtray the morning after a party and the brief, involuntary smoker’s shudder of self-loathing triggered by tipping it into the bin.