Sad to hear that David Hockney has died, aged 88. One of Britain’s finest artists, he was a guest at several Forest events, including a private dinner at Boisdale and a reception at the House of Commons.

My favourite memory, however, was the day he travelled to Brighton to speak at a fringe meeting organised by Forest at the 2005 Labour Party conference where we were protesting against the proposed smoking ban. More on that below, but first …

I was told he had died a few minutes before I was due to give an interview, via Zoom, for BBC Look North about hospital smoking bans. I did the interview and was then asked if I’d like to say a few words about Hockney, a lifelong smoker who spent years denouncing smoking bans whilst arguing that smoking was good for his mental health.

Anyway, for what will probably be the last time, please humour me while I repeat a story I have written about several times. It began in 2004 when I read that Hockney was opposed to the threat of a public smoking ban in the UK. A few months earlier Forest had launched a campaign against a proposed ban and we were trying to attract support from ‘celebrities’ including artists and musicians.

David was living in California but I knew he visited the UK from time to time (he had a studio in Kensington) so I wrote to him in America and invited him to a private dinner we were hosting at Boisdale of Bishopsgate in the City of London. The restaurant is closed now but it was quite an intimate venue and the eight or nine guests included musician Joe Jackson, Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood (later Sir Ronald), and Boisdale MD Ranald Macdonald. Hockney, however, wasn’t one of them because I didn’t get a reply to my letter and I forgot about it.

Instead, something miraculous happened. We had just sat down to dinner when, out of the blue, in walked Hockney. I was gobsmacked, but thrilled to see him. It turned out that my letter had been faxed from California to Hockney’s manager in London, but David was on his annual holiday in Baden-Baden, a spa town in Germany, and he only arrived in London on the day of our dinner. According to his manager, he was met at Heathrow and given a copy of my letter, whereupon he came straight to Bishopsgate.

We had a wonderful evening and the following day I rang David to thank him for coming. Remarkably he described it as a “life-enhancing occasion” and said it had inspired him to write a letter to the Guardian (Smoking is my choice) that duly appeared in the print edition a day or two later. I genuinely couldn’t believe it.

The following year, with the Labour Government threatening to go further than the partial ban that was promised in the party’s 2005 Election manifesto, we invited David to join us at the Labour Party conference in Brighton where we were organising a small fringe meeting at the Metropole Hotel with a panel chaired by Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox) and featuring Joe Jackson, Anthony Worrall Thompson, and journalist Sue Carroll from the Daily Mirror. (Sadly, Sue died in 2011.)

Once again, Hockney was in Baden-Baden and didn’t commit to come to Brighton until 48 hours before the event, but as soon as he did that changed everything. Suddenly we had story on our hands. A press release was sent out and he was booked to appear on the Today programme (Radio 4) and BBC Breakfast (BBC1).

That set the tone for the day and his description of a Labour minister as “dreary” and “bossy” was reported by the BBC News website and other media including the London Evening Standard. By the time he arrived at the Hilton Hotel in Brighton – where we had arranged a photo op at two o’clock – there was a pack of photographers waiting to meet him. One member of the paparazzi even brought Stuart Holmes, a well-known anti-tobacco campaigner, to the hotel so he could set up a photo featuring the two of them!

It was chaotic but very funny when the hotel management decided – unilaterally – to have Holmes forcibly removed from the room via a fire exit while Hockney stood nonchalantly, if a trifle bemused, with a placard that read ‘DEATH awaits you even if you do not smoke’.

From there I had to escort our VIP to the temporary BBC studio in the conference centre so he could be interviewed by Andrew Neil. We almost got lost but I managed to get him on set just in time. And after that it was a short walk to The Grand Hotel where we had arranged interviews with the Press Association and several broadsheets.

With the clock ticking, we then had to make our way to the Metropole Hotel for our fringe meeting which was at five o’clock in a small room on the ground floor. Lo and behold, the room was completely packed with every seat taken and people forced to sit on the floor. There was even a queue of people outside, unable to get in, but what I remember most about that meeting were the waves of laughter, from audience and panel alike.

And then, with the meeting finished, there was one thing left to do. We had booked a Cuban-themed restaurant so we could take our speakers, including Claire, Joe Jackson and David Hockney, plus a few other guests, to dinner. There was even a late, unexpected guest – a journalist from The Sunday Times – who had rushed down from London having been sent by his editor to interview the great man.

Finally, after Hockney had left to return to London, and our other guests had disappeared into the night, I walked back to my hotel. En route the heavens opened and when I got back to my room I was so wet I had to peel off my suit and leave it in the bath to dry overnight. In a strange way it was the perfect end to the best day of my working life.

But our association with Hockney didn’t end there. In 2008, a year after the introduction of the smoking ban, he attended a reception we hosted at Boisdale of Belgravia. He didn’t stay long, though, because there were a lot of people and it was noisy and he was already suffering from hearing difficulties. Instead he was taken by journalist Lynn Barber to the art gallery next door and we saw no more of him that evening. (Barber’s subsequent article was nice about Hockney, less so about Forest!)

We nevertheless kept in touch with him and in 2011 he attended another Forest event – a reception on the terrace of the House of Commons – where he addressed the 200 guests from a small podium. The following year he left Bridlington in Yorkshire, where he had been living for several years, and returned to California before moving to Normandy in France where he lived, I think, until 2022. During that ten-year period we lost contact with him although we continued to send information and invitations to his Kensington address.

His last significant intervention in the smoking debate took place during Covid when he cottoned on to the fact that, according to research, smokers appeared to be at less risk of developing Covid (although they were at greater risk if they did catch it).

Anyway, here’s a the brief tribute I issued on behalf of Forest earlier today:

“David attended several of our events and we were proud and immensely grateful that he supported our campaign against the smoking ban which he described as 'the most grotesque piece of social engineering'.
“He also noted that 'pubs aren't health clubs' and believed that smoking was good for his mental health.
“He lived life on his own terms, and what a fabulous and productive life that was. He will be gteatly missed by everyone who values individual freedom.”

Claire (Fox) has also tweeted a tribute:

We’ve lost one of the greats. Not only as an iconic artist of huge orginality, but also a public figure with the courage to be a dissident. I once had the honour of chairing David Hockney on a panel. Yes, it was about the excessive Nanny statism about smoking. He made an eloquent case for choice & liberty. I was excessively star-struck. He was excessively modest. Ahh. Such a loss.

See also: Hockney leads smoking ban protest (BBC News, 28 September 2005), Hockney blows smoke on Labour's plan to ban tobacco (Independent, 29 September 2005)

From this blog:
Hockney: Smoking remains an act of defiance (February 2020)
Hockney blasts Britain’s ‘professional anti-smokers’ (May 2020)
Happy 80th birthday, David Hockney! (July 2017)
David Hockney lights up the House of Commons (June 2012)

David Hockney, 1937-2026

Hockney and freedom

1966 and all that