After banning smoking in public places last year the Government is on the anti-smoking warpath again. This time they’re determined to stop children taking up the filthy habit and, in the process, to ruin the NHS for us all.

Their plan of attack includes an excellent TV advert (you know, the one featuring the “I’m the King of the Swingers” sound track but sadly no smoking monkeys) and proposing the removal of all branding from cigarette boxes.

Some have criticized the idea of unbranded cigarette packets as madness and another infringement on our personal freedoms. A spokesman from the smokers’ lobby group “Coughing Up Blood” wheezed:

“My granddad said the only thing that got him through the Normandy landings was chain smoking the cigarettes he stole form bodies of his comrades strewn across the beaches of France and again later from the mortuary.

This proposal goes against everything he fought for.”

But, even considering the convincing arguments against the proposals, I’m with the Government on this one.

After all which do children like more comic books - with all those pictures and words and stuff - or sheets of plain paper?

Answer me that, will you?

And what do kids buy more of, Miley Cyrus albums - with those dirty pictures of her back - or blank CD-Rs - that contain absolutely no nude back pictures at all?

Yep, categorical proof that kids like stuff with pictures, words and recordings of cats having their claws pulled out on it.

Anyways, forget all that, I have a better plan to put kids off the idea of smoking - make all cigarettes look like the Nicorette Inhalator.

Because if by making smoking a cigarette look like you’re sucking a lit tampon doesn’t reduce the numbers of smokers then nothing will.

And I say while we’re at it go the whole hog, design them so you can only stick one in your gob by using an unwieldy plastic applicator, ooh, and put the little bit of string on the end too.

I think it’s fair to say that most people would rather walk round with massive blobs of blue ink in the corner of their mouths then suck on a tampon - even if it was in a designated tampon sucking area.

The only down side I can see to my plan is that there could be an increase in the number of vaginal burns amongst absent minded female smokers but I think it’s a risk worth taking.