Cigarette, my dear?

Everyone knows smoking is bad for you. Why? Firstly, because it's writ large on fag packets. And, secondly, if you ever see a TV character holding a cigarette you know it’s a baddy. Or Dot Cotton.

It wasn’t always like this. Bogart and Bacall, Jimmy Dean, Sandra D. How come smoking was ok then?

Because nobody knew it was bad for you.

Really? You must have had an inkling, surely? What about all the coughing and wheezing?

Ok, we knew about that, but not that it could kill you.

What about the increase in lung cancer in the early 20th century coinciding with the increase in cigarette smoking?

The man credited with making the link was epidemiologist Richard Doll.

Sir Richard was one of the finest British scientists of the last century and did more to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking than anyone else. But spotting the link between smoking and lung cancer principally consisted of asking people with the disease if they smoked, them saying 'yes' and another tick going in the 'Nurse, I think we’re on to something' box.

But people didn't believe it. There was no proof of the link. Ok, so almost everyone with lung cancer was a smoker. But maybe it was their predisposition to lung cancer that caused them to smoke? That's straight from the pages of the It's Not Guns That Shoot People book of logic.

Even after the slightly surreal headline in the New York Times in 1970: '12 Dogs Develop Lung Cancer in Group of 86 Taught to Smoke', the tobacco industry dismissed the evidence because smoking had not been proved unsafe to 'human health'. These were just media 'scare stories'. People aren't, after all, Beagles.

Now even the tobacco companies admit that their products 'may cause harm'. In 1954 George Weissman, the vice-president of Philip Morris, said that the cigarette industry 'would stop business tomorrow if it believed smoking was harmful'.

Still waiting, Georgie.

**PS. Apparently there are other soap characters who smoke and aren't, on the whole, baddies. And Dot Cotton has remarried and is now called Dot Branning. So what do I know?

The science of Our Lord

The world isn’t flat. In the 15th century brave adventurers failed repeatedly in their attempts to sail off the edge. In 1530, a Polish preacher by the name of Nicolaus Copernicus pointed out that not only was the Earth decidedly un-flat, but that it was suspended in space, rotated on its axis every day and went around the sun once a year.

As a man of God Copernicus was a bit worried about voicing this idea because it didn’t fit with the teachings of the church. But he trod carefully and got away with it.

In 1633 the Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei was rather more outspoken and got into trouble. He advanced Copernican theory and ended up being tried by the Inquisition in Florence and put under house-arrest for the rest of his life.

The reason was that God, speaking to the world through his PR people in the Vatican, said that the Earth, centre of all creation, wasn’t going to demean itself by revolving around anything else.

The Pope at the time, Urban VIII, was known for his interest in science and earlier had been a big fan of the multi-talented Galileo. Until Galileo contradicted God. As a servant of the Lord, Pope Urban was compelled to punish this heresy. Mere scientific evidence can’t go against the word of God.

But science did eventually get the upper hand on the planet question. Not that God was wrong. God doesn’t get stuff wrong. We must have misunderstood what he meant. Maybe He meant that the Earth was the centre of the universe in a spiritual, not a physical sense? Yeah, that works for me.

The Catholic Church, to be fair, did apologise for punishing Galileo. In 1992. Better 359 years late then never.

The new Pope, the equally scholarly Benedict XVI, has promised to listen to the will of God rather than follow his own ideas. The Lord, ever up to date with the latest scientific developments, apparently thinks that condoms won't help prevent the spread of HIV.

And He, as we know, doesn’t make mistakes.

Iain Duncan Smith

Now I know the Conservative party had been at sea for a while. Margaret Thatcher, whatever you think of her, was a hard act to follow. John Major wasn’t quite Maggie. A good thing, maybe, but unfortunately not quite being someone else isn’t really enough on it’s own.

And William Hague, plucky parliamentary performer though he may have been, was never going to be prime minister. No amount of 14 pint lad-talk could make us forget that speech the tweed-wearing teenager had made to the Conservative party conference in 1977. 16-year olds can and should be forgiven for a lot. Telling a room full of middle-aged men of the need to create a "capital-owning, home-owning democracy for the young people" is a snotty-nosed bridge too far.

But nothing could quite ready a waiting Britain for Iain Duncan Smith. Just what were they thinking? During the leadership campaign Norman Tebbit offered his support by saying IDS was "a remarkably normal man with a family". Churchill must have been quaking in his grave.

Whenever IDS was in the spotlight he had that bewildered look of a man thinking "why am I here and what are all those people looking at?" We all asked the very same question.

Who can forget that spleen-liquifying moment when his speechwriters, in attempt to inject a bit of spirit, made him stand up and say "The quiet man is back, and he’s turning up the VOLUME!"

It was like they were playing a prank on the work-experience boy.

Things started to inevitably fall down around him and it became clear that the charisma-vacuum was the least of his problems. No matter what the party machine was trying to tell us, his political views were so out of step with the vast majority of the electorate his lack of personality started to look like one of his better qualities.

We were so busy laughing at how wooden he was we forgot all about his politics. He may have admitted to nothing more extreme than being against gays in the military. Privately, though he would have been happy to change "gays" for "blacks" and "military" for "golf club".

So it was clearly a mistake for the Conservative party to try and convince us that an unpalatable right-winger was a dynamic, forward-looking leader, capable of making Britain a fairer, safer and sunnier place to live. Thank God they wouldn’t try that trick again.

That man Hitler isn't so bad

It is now widely accepted that Adolf Hitler was not a good person. Among those with even the loosest grip on reality the consensus is that his behaviour was, to put it firmly, just not on.

At the risk of offending Holocaust-deniers, neo-Nazis and any other assorted loonies, I want to state that the actions of the Third Reich really did leave a lot to be desired.

What do Lord Rothermere, George W’s grandpa and Arnie’s dad have in common? They were all, allegedly, not quite so forthcoming in their condemnation of the Blackshirts.

But what about the rest of us? Ok, we did gang up and stop the madness eventually, but there was a great deal of whistling and looking the other way first.

The French may have smelled a rat early-doors, but they work on the assumption that anyone with a German accent is a wrong-un unless proved otherwise.

But the US government, in the days before German allies started getting jiggy stateside, thought Hitler was a stand-up guy who made doing business with the weedy Europeans easier.

Our own Lord Halifax, British emissary to Germany, was right behind the Führer as he thought Adolf and co. were doing a sterling job of keeping those damned commies in their place.

Hindsight may be a marvellous thing, but concentration camps are not as easy to hide as you may think. You can imagine Goebbels saying to Hitler: “Call them work camps, put a snappy slogan above the gate, they’ll never know!”

At least we’ve learned our lesson now, though. Never again will the world stand by while a tyrannical regime kills innocent people for their racial identity.

I do hope I’m not overlooking anything.

Dodgy medical practices 1: Bloodletting

“Please help him, doctor!”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. He’s dying. His injuries are horrific. I could try letting some blood but it’s too late to do any good.”

You’re damn right it won’t do any good, doctor. The last thing a person who’s bleeding to death needs is to have a doctor take what little claret he has left.

And yet for centuries bloodletting, or phlebotomy, was bona fide cutting-edge doctoring. Just the ticket for anything from a fever to a collapsed lung.

It goes back to Ancient Egypt and was later one of the main treatments fostered upon an eager world by the father of modern medicine, the old Quackmeister General himself, Hippocrates.

Ok, so in the 5th century BC there wasn’t much else available. If you were in a fix you’d try anything. If it seemed more scientific than sacrificing a goat you'd give it a go. But surely as the centuries passed questions must have been raised?

Yet in 1799, poor George Washington died after being bled of 9 pints of blood (a pint more than your standard body-full) in a mere 24 hours. He only had a sore throat for pity’s sake.

Surely there was some junior doctor at the back thinking, “you know, this just really isn’t working”.

But it took until the beginning of the 20th century, more than three thousand years after it was first invented, for the phlebotomy penny to finally drop.

God knows how many people were saved from an early check-out because the doctor got lost on the way.

Thankfully we live in more enlightened times now.

Botox, anyone?