Smoke ban means Boot's on other foot

Daily Telegraph pubs writer ADAM EDWARDS reports on how Labour's smoke ban plan has seen one true blue switch allegiance

My good friend Boot is a Tory. He is so blue he could croon about the moon with Elvis and yet today he will probably cast his vote for Labour, although it may be some time before he hums The Red Flag.

If Labour sweep to victory, Boot will be swigging a celebratory bottle of bubbly and tucking into a bespoke Scotch egg. If the Tories claim Number 10, it will be a gloomy pint of wallop and a bacon butty cooked on licensed premises.

Boot, christened Philip Christopherson but known to all and sundry by the footwear sobriquet after a nag that he swore couldn't lose came last at York races, runs Nibblers, a company that successfully supplies the licensed trade with salted almonds, Swedish salamis and other rare accompaniments to alcoholic refreshment. When New Labour decided to introduce its plan for a blanket smoking ban in any pub where fresh food was prepared, Boot was delighted.

"The pub snack's time has come at last," he said after cornering me over a pint of Young's Special in the Seven Tuns. "Forward not back," he added mysteriously and disappeared.

Last week he reappeared at the boozer with a pair of egg boxes. In one were half a dozen hard-boiled quails' eggs wrapped in ovals of sausage meat, and in the other, six similarly clad eggs belonging to a pheasant.

He had christened these nouvelle Scotch spheres the Highlander and the Woodlander respectively. They were, he said, the solution to the all-daybreakfast in New Labour's no-smoking pubs.

The nourishing nuggets were cooked off the premises yet they could, if one so wished, contain ­ in addition to sausage, egg and fried breadcrumb ­ a bit of black pudding, lardons, mushroom or even a quarter of a cherry tomato.

It was agreed by all that Boot's all-day cold breakfast was a delicious stroke of genius.

It was at that moment that the local Tory MP Geoffrey Clifton-Brown chose to canvas the snug bar. The Conservatives, said the politician, took a libertarian view and unlike New Labour would allow smoking in every pub.

The party of The Right would not mind a gasper and a greasy working man's fry-up in the same building, providing there was a proper sealed wall between the two vices.

This was grim news for the future of the breakfast ball. "Let them eat quail's eggs," said Boot of New Labour, which was the moment when Mr Clifton-Brown chose to make his excuses and leave.

Plastic fantastic

I am keen on the proposal by the Bank of England to make the £5 note from a polymerplastic.

The bank wishes to produce a longer lasting "bluey" because the note is used "in so manyperson-to-person transactions" that it gets more wear and tear than other notes.

The fiver is the staple of boozing life. It is a note for the trouser-pocket not the jacket wallet. It is the perfect sum for the small bet, quiz-night entrance fee, decent sandwich, packet of fags or acouple of pints. And now itwill have one further use ­ as a convenient beer mat.

Blasting the boundaries

Prince Charles who occasionally visits the Rose & Crown in Boyleston, Derbyshire, invited its landlady Barbara Fell to the royal wedding.

According to Ms Fell "everyone was so nice and friendly" that she not only chatted away to Charles and Camilla but also spoke to the Queen and introduced herself to the King of Bahrain.

I don't care if her only topic of conversation was the price of a packet of pork scratching, a woman who can make small talk to an English prince, an Arab king and a Derbyshire agricultural worker is the queen of landladies and therefore quite deserving of a royal invitation.

Platter patter

At the end of this month the Tin Goose, described by its owners as a gastro pub (I think we'll be the judge of its pub credentials), opens at Heathrow Airport's new Terminal One extension. According to Geronimo Inns, travellers from across the globe will find it "an interesting and exciting place to dine".

I have my doubts.

Despite the fact that Geronimo Inns has an outstanding track record, the Goose is sited in one of the naffest places on Earth, it will be full of tourists and it is themed around the usual airport cliché of 1930s travel.

But most disastrously, it has changed the name of its only genuine pub dish "ploughman's lunch" to the daintier-sounding "ploughman's platter".

With the change of one word, Geronimo has managed to vulgarise the language, suburbanise the countryside, make the British agricultural labourer sound like a Nancy boy and turn its planned interesting and exciting pub into an airport lounge.