Cigar Weekly

The Times (London)

In Seville for my cousin's wedding, I discovered that the custom in Spain is for the bride's father to hand round cigars after the reception. Thus, at about 2am, thanks to the Spanish habit of eating their evening meal in the middle of the night, I came into possession of a very decent Montecristo. Two actually, because my brother gave me his.

Three, in fact, as I ordered my son to secure one as well. Nothing better illustrates the weed-worship and machismo that still predominate in Spanish culture than that no one seemed to find an 11-year-old boy asking for a Havana at all odd.

Given that the Spanish are taking the usual relaxed attitude towards their smoking ban that Mediterranean countries reserve for European Union directives (ie, they regard the new law as a suggestion, perhaps a guideline, at best an aspiration) I was able to fire up my treat where I sat, indoors, in a public place. Coming from the law-abiding North, this felt like a revolutionary act, whereas what struck me about the whole clipping, lighting and puffing ritual is that you can't perform it without turning into a capitalist pig.

Even in tobacco-crazy Spain, where, as with golf in Scotland, cigars are devoid of some of the class connotations that they hold elsewhere, the geometry of a big cigar impels you, try as you might, to dispatch children up chimneys, mismanage a merchant bank or stroll across a country house terrace cooking up some disastrous imperialist imbroglio. Once it's down to a stub, you can do a George Patton/Tim Collins growling man of the people number, but if there is a democratic method of enjoying the first two-thirds of a cigar of any reasonable length and girth, I could not find it.

Long after the top hat and tails have been consigned to the dressing-up box of history, such is the enduring symbolism of the big cigar, I think they would be a superb way of testing the new post-Livingstone theory that it is once again cool to be posh. Get Boris chugging on a big fat Churchill, stick the picture on the front page, see what the voters make of that.

They might tolerate it now, in his honeymoon, but it would come back to haunt him, you can be sure. I can't think of anything legal - or illegal, come to that - with the same power to brand someone rich, posh and ever-so-slightly suspect as a Havana.

The cigars I smoked in Seville were my first since I was in Cuba ($4 for a top-of-the-range robusto, madness not to) 15 years ago. Strange, all the egalitarian advances in that decade and a half (first names all round, the slow death of the tie, affordable restaurants, champagne at eight quid the bottle in Tesco) and yet, thanks to the US trade boycott, the Cuban cigar continues to burn brightly as the plutocrat's prop of choice.