Is £180 for an hour of pleasure worth it? Imagine sitting in an exclusive private members’ club, puffing on one of the Montecristo Supremos Edición Limitada 2019 cigars from a £4,500 box of 25, and plotting world domination with your co-conspirators. I don’t know about you, but that image is enticing. And frankly, adults should be allowed to spend their money however they please.

The Labour government is currently considering proposals to extend cigarette-style plain packaging to cigars, which until now have been exempt. The ornate boxes, with their crests, Victorian-era awards, romantic scenes of voyages, gold leaf and paper seals, would all give way to “drab dark brown” Pantone 448 C, considered the ugliest color possible by some esteemed committee. There would be exhortations to quit, accompanied by a full-color picture of a lung autopsy. The purpose here is no secret: it’s to make cigars as ugly as possible.

Cigars are not cigarettes, though. The box is not something stuffed into one’s cross-body pouch or party clutch on the way to a rave. You don’t tear it open, chain-smoke the contents and drunkenly discard it on the street. Instead, the box is part of the ritual and provenance of a product still rolled by hand, by workers trained in techniques handed down over generations. You collect them, age them, give them as presents, and spend up to an hour and a half relishing their flavors.

Of course, cigars are not good for you. Nor is drinking, staying up after 10pm, or going out in winter without enough clothes on. It is one of life’s irritating rules that plenty of what is most fun also increases the likelihood of death.

Public-health authorities, drunk on post-Covid power, are no longer content to tell us what’s bad and mitigate the harm; instead, they demand that the thing in question becomes as repulsive as possible. The Government’s tobacco consultation promises a “fairer UK” in which the “root causes and inequalities that shape ill-health” are addressed. Next comes the telling sentence: “Addiction is not a choice.” Take both of these ideological claims together, and you have the paternalist’s syllogism: you didn’t really choose this vice, so let us nauseate you out of it.

But no one mistakes a cigar for a mud bath or activated-charcoal smoothie. It is expensive, leisurely and smelly enough to annoy many people. It exists precisely because people sit around and enjoy it. Naturally, the pub snug, with its blankets and heat lamps, belongs in the same sinful category: comfort for comfort’s sake.

The rich will cope. The cigar courtyard at 5 Hertford Street won’t fall silent. The proposed tatty ugliness will instead be borne by cigar shops, collectors and ordinary enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the authentic box will acquire even more of the exclusivity and glamour the Government is trying to stamp out. A cigar box used to be meaningful. Now, I suppose, we should all smoke pineapple-ice-flavored vapes.