The smoking lobby is never short of new angles, and whichever committee or pressure group is quoted, you know it is the tobacco companies behind it all – and why not? Every restriction on selling, using or advertising tobacco represents a potential loss of profit for them.

The current battleground is the ban on smoking in pubs, clubs and restaurants. First there was the mad idea to exempt pubs which do not serve food, and now it is private members’ clubs.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs, the justification given today by the chair of the parliamentary all-party clubs group was, quite frankly, bollocks.

‘Private members’ clubs are non-profit-making and are self-regulating. Any legislation that would oblige them to impose a blanket smoking ban would breach that self-regulating principle.

I am sure the same argument does not exempt them from other environmental health or health & safety regulations or any other laws.

Or maybe they are allowed to store raw and cooked meats on the same shelf in the fridge, to not have any fire exits or extinguishers or to not have hand-washing facilities in the toilets?

Maybe they are allowed to pay their staff less than the minimum wage, hold dog fights, have no provision for disabled access and store enriched uranium because to lay down the law on these would breach the self-regulating principle?

If a private members club has a fire or a robbery, the 999 operators are not going to tell them to look after it themselves because they are self-regulating are they?

Its a spurious argument, motivated by two forces: the tobacco manufacturers and the knowledge that this affects all the Labour clubs and Tory associations in the constituencies of all these MPs.

Bear in mind that I am a committed smoker myself. I enjoy a smoke with my coffee after a meal and with my pint down the pub. As long as I am allowed to I will continue to do so as I have no willpower on this, and I am looking to legislation to save me from myself, as well as saving bar staff and other drinkers/eaters from my secondary smoke.

I can remember when you could smoke in the cinema, in the office, on trains and in Underground stations, on buses, in shopping malls and in many shops – jewellers all used to have ashtrays on the counter. As every one of these places was mooted as a candidate for a ban there was uproar and we smokers thought life would be unbearable, but we quickly adjusted and now it seems unbelievable that smoking on trains was ever allowed. We will get used to not smoking in pubs too.

But leave a loophole and we will all go off and join clubs. Some pubs will become clubs to get their business back and nothing will have changed. So stop arguing about it and just do it, without leaving any exemptions.