Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, is the bookmakers’ favourite to be Keir Starmer’s successor. She is also someone who has recently given up vaping, according to the government minister Steve Reed, who had dinner with her at the weekend and told Sky News about it. These two facts about her – wanting to be PM and quitting vaping – are almost certainly connected.

Plainly, giving up vaping is preparation for the highest office. Rayner loves vaping: who can forget that fabulous photo of her, in the middle of the tax turmoil that led to her resignation last year, vaping in a dinghy off Brighton beach? You can get away with a huge amount of vaping as a middle-aged woman, owing to your fabled cloak of invisibility. I have vaped in committee room 10 in the House of Commons. I have vaped in the middle of an interview about whether or not vaping is bad for you. But I draw the line at vaping in the middle of the actual sea.

You can, of course, see why a prospective prime minister would think they need to quit vaping. You wouldn’t want a primary school teacher, priest or parkrun coordinator to do it, because of what it signals: a low-level but deeply held addiction, poor impulse control, a little bit of had-enough-of-experts contrarianism that........

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