As extortionate tax on vaping looms, am I about to join UK's most famous user and quit? – Janet Christie
Janet Christie finds she is both disappointed and jealous that former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has apparently managed to quit vaping
As the UK basks in record temperatures and the heat is on in the run-up to the Makerfield by-election, with all its implications for who inhabits No10, Angela Rayner is spotted looking chilled about it all, on a beach in Sussex in shorts and Crocs. Disturbingly, her vape was absent which could mean recent reports of her giving up are true.
As a committed vaper, a photograph of Rayner puffing away whilst paddling a kayak off Brighton beach is a favourite of mine. It appeals on many levels, none of them political, apart from the signalling that she’s more in touch with voters than many MPs.
It’s an image of a multi-tasking woman, juggling an oar and vape whilst bobbing around in an inflatable boat. She looks comfortable in her skin, enjoying a British seaside resort. It’s the antithesis of the usual politicians’ holiday shots of wholesome families posing in the rolling, cypress-ridged hills of Tuscany, lavender fields of Provence or on palm-fringed beaches in sunny tax havens. It looks real. A bit rubbish, but actually OK, like most people’s holidays.
No return for vaping Rover
But now she’s abandoning us, the vapers. There will be no one left. First it was Liz McDonald, landlady of Coronation Street’s Rovers Return, one of the few on TV who vaped as a matter of course, a quick puff between serving up pints/advice/revenge, as opposed to it being a signifier for dodgy, working-class or teenaged. Then one day she wafted out of the Rover’s in a cloud of watermelon never to return.
Now the nation’s most high-profile vaper is said to be giving up. Whether it’s part of a bid to be next PM, I don’t care. Although the sight of Rayner gasping away like Darth Vader on the steps of No 10 alongside Larry the Cat to avoid her disapproving family’s taunts of ‘vape dragon’ would be another great image.
And so the high-profile poster girl/boy cohort dwindles to Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry, Johnny Depp and Bella Hadid, all way too Hollywood for an activity that’s about huddling alone in urine-soaked doorways, shunned by the beautiful people, peacefully ruminating and reading the graffiti.
Vape tax on its way
I’m not defending the habit. Who knows what’s in the gunk filling my vape and I don’t do it indoors as my nicotine-free friends, which is all of them now, consider it a poison that kills houseplants and/or people (I don’t kick back with musings about the effects of socially acceptable excessive alcohol consumption because each to their own, and they might lock me out, they’re a bit hammered). But it has helped me stop smoking.
Sitting with my disappointment over Rayner is jealousy – I’d like to stop too. I’m weary of the uproar a sly puff provokes and it’s got to be the healthier option.
But the real death knell is the UK Government’s Vaping Products Duty or ‘vape tax’, coming in October – an extortionate 22p a millilitre and 20 per cent VAT! Now that’s a tax I doubt neither Rayner nor I are willing to pay.
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