The Wall Street Journal has just discovered that the British like to have a pint or five before getting on a plane. Instead of their readers filing it under “eccentricities” like Morris dancing or sticking out a pinkie finger while drinking tea, the comments below the article are pretty brutal towards the Brits. Most agree with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary that UK airports should stop selling alcohol in the mornings, or at least serve no more than two drinks to customers.

There is a certain Puritan snobbery coming from a country that briefly banned alcohol, but I suspect we Brits have enough snobbery on this subject ourselves.

In a poll of 14,500 Times readers, a 67% supermajority voted in favour of banning alcohol before morning flights. The paper’s readers are stereotypically affluent, Right-of-centre, and anti-nanny-state. I’m sure they would never be seen dead paying for a woo-woo in one of Gatwick’s nine pubs or bars, preferring to recline in one of Heathrow’s British Airways lounges and drink VSOP brandy for free.

Who might the drunken and yobbish offenders be in our mind’s eye: a hen do with penis straws, a benefits scrounger with a passport, or a family of professional plumbers off to Benidorm? Maybe some are nervous flyers who’ve already spent six hours getting airside, are already on Koh Samui time, and want to start spending the money they spent months saving.

The evidence, however, refuses to be so easily typecast; passengers in long-haul first class can be just as bad. A Delta passenger to Seattle rather memorably “attacked a flight attendant and a snack basket before being restrained”. Meanwhile, a woman travelling from Barbados shouted, “I hope this plane crashes”, after being moved from first class to economy because she was “loud and abusive”. Are these the kind of customers that O’Leary would prefer to have?

The airport pint is now as British as losing a fascinator in the mud at Ascot, or getting trapped in a Portaloo at Glastonbury. According to myth, it all started in 1783, when the first airborne bottle of champagne was popped open on a hot-air balloon. And the Royal Navy famously gave sailors overproof rum until 1970, because a sailor’s “only refuge from the savage world in which he found himself, was to fill himself with spirits.”

For my sins, I am guilty of indulging in the practice myself. If it’s from Heathrow Terminal 5, you will see me at the Fortnum and Mason champagne bar having a half bottle and smoked salmon. If that’s not available, well, I hear the bespoke carpets at Wetherspoons are nice. All a suggested ban on having more than two drinks will do is encourage people to find ways around the rules. I suggest we start doing the “O’Leary crawl”, having two drinks in each bar and then on the plane. That’ll show him.

But I have a newsflash: being drunk on a plane is already illegal. The problem is not a lack of rules; it’s a lack of enforcement. Airline staff, police and airport security already have ample powers to deal with disruptive passengers, yet the worst offenders still slip through the net.

In a sense, O’Leary is railing against a culture he helped create. He spent three decades making air travel cheap enough for the masses, and now seems horrified that the masses have arrived. That doesn’t mean we should tolerate passengers turning aircraft cabins into mobile nightclubs or lavatories into biohazards. But the freedom to sink a few pints before a flight is a great British tradition, and one worth defending against the po-faced busybodies forever looking for another excuse to tell everyone else how to behave.