End of an era

When we quoted Daily Mail columnist Tom Utley in the Forest newsletter this week, little did we know he was on the cusp of retirement.

Writing to subscribers the day before the Budget on Wednesday, we quoted from a recent column in which he wrote:

All I will say, as a 40-a-day addict, is that I now pay the Treasury some £9,000 a year in tobacco taxes alone. I don't see why so many non-smokers seem to feel that I'm costing them money. Just lately, however, overall tax revenues from tobacco have been falling steadily – from £10.19 billion in 2021 to a forecast £7.96 billion in 2029-30.

Among other factors, including 'changing attitudes to smoking and the increasing popularity of vapes', the OBR blames 'falling cigarette consumption driven by above-inflation duty rises'.

With that warning in mind, I reckon that a sensible Chancellor who was desperate for cash might think twice before reducing Government revenues further by imposing yet another inflation-busting increase in the price of cigarettes.

Inevitably, Rachel Reeves wasn’t listening, but I’ll address that in another post. In the meantime, the reason I was unaware of Tom’s imminent retirement (his final weekly column was published today) is because I missed a previous column, published in September, in which he announced he was retiring at the end of November. Belatedly, then, I would like to add to the many messages of goodwill he has received.

Our paths first crossed shortly after I joined Forest in 1999, 26 years ago. Auberon Waugh, who was a hero of mine when I was a student, was editing the Literary Review from a small office in Soho, and had recently founded the Academy Club in an adjacent building.

Although the name sounds quite grand, the location was a spartan room with a tiny bar and a handful of tables and chairs on the first floor of a rather Dickensian property that overlooked Lexington Street.

Waugh was a supporter of Forest and he suggested that we should ‘sponsor’ a series of monthly soirees to which he would invite many of the writers and journalists he had ‘persuaded’ to contribute to his magazine without payment, and this was a way of saying thank you. Tom was there at least once, and that was how we met, although I doubt he will remember.

After Bron’s death in 2001 the soirees came to an end, but I enjoyed Tom’s writing (he was a long-serving leader writer for the Daily Telegraph at the time), and in 2003 – after he urged ‘Smokers of the world unite! We have been bullied and nannied long enough’ – we awarded him the title ‘Journalist of the Year’.

In a subsequent article for the Telegraph he described how 'chuffed' he was to win the award. Unfortunately, he added, he had been 'waiting in vain to discover what physical form the award would take'. Unhappily, he concluded, 'The award seems to consist entirely of a sentence on an obscure website on the Internet.'

We made amends by sending him 200 Marlboro Reds (his cigarette of choice), and Tom subsequently attended multiple Forest events, rarely missing our annual lunch (or dinner) at Boisdale. In 2022 he was presented with another award (receiving our much coveted Voices of Freedom trophy!), and thereby became the only person to have received two Forest awards.

Tom is 72 now and still smoking 40-a-day, apparently. One or two people have been critical of what, in their view, is his somewhat apologetic manner when it comes to defending his self-confessed ‘dirty’ addiction, but I look at it another way.

Having been poached from the Telegraph in 2006, Tom has been writing for the Daily Mail for almost 20 years now. I know the paper well because I’ve been a reader since I was 13 and it is not, in my experience, anti-smoking.

Politically it’s relatively neutral on the subject, but the Mail’s success in recent decades has been based on several factors, one of which is its health section, and in that context Tom’s frequent admission that he smokes has always struck me as rather subversive.

Either way, we have lost one of the few smoker-friendly voices that still exist in the mainstream media. (Offhand, I can’t think of any others.) More important, perhaps, I can’t think of any other journalists who currently write about everyday life in such a humorous, modest, and self-effacing way.

Columnists today are expected to have strident opinions about everything (or so it seems), so for someone like me – who is old enough to remember the late Colin Reid, another celebrated columnist for the Daily Mail – Tom’s retirement feels like the end of an era.

I’ve assured him, though, that he will always be welcome at our events, so I sincerely hope this isn’t the last we see of him.

Above: Tom Utley at the Forest annual lunch in 2024, and Smoke On The Water the same year; below: Tom and me at our lunch at Boisdale in 2022 where he received a ‘Voices of Freedom’ award (which he is holding the wrong way round but no-one noticed).