Nick Hogan, the pub smokers’ champ, cannot complain that he was denied the relief of lighting up during his 11 days in Forest Bank jail. No sooner was he through the wrong side of the clanging gates than he was greeted by warders offering him baccy, a box of matches and a supply of roll-up papers.

Nor was he the beneficiary of preferential treatment. Every convict, whatever his crime, is handed the same gifts to ease his existence in durance vile while paying his debt to society. You could say that by being thrown in jug, Hogan had become one of a few thousand privileged people in the United Kingdom.

If you are, like he was, an imprisoned guest of Her Majesty, or a soldier in barracks, or an inmate of a lunatic asylum or, an elected or peer-appointed member of both Houses of Parliament you may, with one or two minor limitations, smoke anywhere in a public place with a roof on it.

The rest of us may be run in for smoking under the leaking tin lid of a bus shelter. And that is not the end of it. Some municipal health fascists live in high, and not too fantastical hopes, of banning smoking in parks – or within 400 outdoor yards of a crematorium garden.

Hogan was locked up for six months because he had still not paid £8,664.40p in fines and damages imposed for letting people smoke in his then pub, The Swan Hotel, Bolton, after the government implemented its despotic ban on every public building in the country.

He didn’t refuse to pay. He said he could not pay because he was bankrupt. The cops were sent to carry him off to jail all the same – though his debts to the court could surely have been abstracted gradually from the future income of his businesses.

What is it that Justice Secretary Jack Straw said about locking up only those who presented a danger to society? What is it that many a judge, or a magistrate, gives in excuse for letting a pernicious burglar or a sexual molester loose, on a suspended sentence? It is that Straw and his underlings, in despair over lack of cell-room, have urged them to reserve incarceration for only the most desperate cases.

Yet they locked up Hogan for owing to the Crown what is a mere pittance when compared to the vast amounts picked from taxpayers’ wallets by MPs paying non-existent mortgages on fraudulent expenses.

Happily, Hogan is now free. His sentence was gloriously abbreviated by a man dressed up as Guy Fawkes turning up with a coffer crammed with the money needed to secure his release. This treasure had been amassed from the donations of admirers, most of them hearing of the publican’s plight over the internet.

Outside the nick, Nick’s first act – after embracing his wife Denise – was to light a proper cigarette. Possibly, some goon had been installed with binoculars on the watchtower to make sure he didn’t light it, illegally, under the 12 inch wide shelter of the prison roof’s eaves.

Banger clanger that even the dog didn’t touch

I TRIED out, the other day, some vegetarian sausages, which had arrived by mistake in a consignment of foodstuffs I had ordered from a grocery- delivery firm. I had to give up after nibbling only half a one, tossing the remaining contents of the frying pan towards Daisy, my dog.

The dog, taking these sawdusty tubes for toys, flicked them up and down with her paws and butted them with her head. When I tried to stuff one in her mouth, she backed away in alarm, as if confronted by a poisonous lunatic.

So much for hot dogs filled with sheepdog-repelling soya. Then I opened the morning newspaper. A half-page advert, sponsored by campaigners for humane farming, showed a little piglet, its eyes popping in terror and pain. The caption read: “How would you feel if someone pulled out your teeth with a pair of pliers? Yes, exactly. Like that piglet.”

Instantly, I got the moral point of trying to produce a porkless sausage. A pity about the taste.

To enjoy a proper sausage, some of us need to suppress the awful knowledge that when prodded into the abattoir pigs wail like babies.

Heavenly Carla is so wise in the ways of love

NOT for one moment should anyone believe the tales about Carla Bruni seeking solace with a pop singer while her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy, the midget president of France, dallies with his beautiful karate champion ecology minister, Chantal Jouanno. Both flings appear to be fictions of a spiteful blogger.

All the same, Carla is less than confident about the futurity of her marriage. When asked if Nico was for keeps, she said: “I guess marriage should be for ever, but who knows? I wish it could be for ever. But we could be dead tomorrow...”

Carla is savvy. She doesn’t expect to meet Sarko in Heaven, that’s for sure.