Jump to full article: Electronic Telegraph (uk), 2006-10-20
Intro: The Lord Harris of High Cross, who died yesterday aged 81, was, with Arthur Seldon, one of the founders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and perhaps the most successful polemicist of the second half of the 20th century, retrieving and advancing free-market ideas which were initially deeply out of favour and providing the intellectual basis for Margaret Thatcher's reforms of the 1980s. . . .
Harris's other great campaign was for the rights of smokers.
He was chairman of and the prime mover in Forest (the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), and a member of the Lords and Commons Pipesmokers Club. He was seldom seen without a pipe clenched between his teeth – "You'll like this," he would assure non-smokers around him as he lit up, "it's a meerschaum" – and usually had a couple more in his pockets, in case of emergency.
When in 1995 Network SouthEast introduced a smoking ban on the London to Brighton route, a group of commuters commandeered a carriage and continued to light up. Harris was tireless in raising the subject in newspapers and in the Lords, and produced a 22-page report urging the company to reinstate a smoking carriage.
He then convened a meeting in a pub near Victoria station and heard evidence from both sides in the dispute. "BR is indicted in my view of skulduggery," he declared, pouring particular scorn on a survey which purported to show overwhelming support for the ban.
He was equally sceptical of the claims of the medical establishment that passive smoking was a significant threat to health, publicly challenging the chief medical officer to produce any evidence of harm in a piece entitled Smoking Out the Truth. In 1998 he produced Murder a Cigarette, which was devoted both to extolling the joys of tobacco and casting doubt on the scientific evidence of its dangers.
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