In the last summer of a century whose few achievements included the fights against sexual and racial discrimination, instances of prejudice at its most blatant appeared in the classified columns of the British press. The Chartered Institute of Taxation announced in the London Evening Standard of 29 June that it had administrative vacancies for "non-smokers" only. In this and other publications, Ace Security of Crowborough, East Sussex, said its posts were reserved for "non-smokers", as did the Visit Britain office in Tonbridge, Kent, Welcome Food Ingredients of Nottinghamshire and Wilmot Packaging of Cheltenham.
None was subtle. Their personnel departments didn't write that "smoking is not permitted on our premises" or "sorry, but this company won't allow you to dash out for a gasper in the rain", but "no smokers", end of story and of your ambitions.
The self-proclaimed smokers' rights group, Forest, which is funded by the tobacco industry, collected the offending adverts in a report released in November. Its chairman, Lord Harris of High Cross, spoke in a surprisingly radical voice for a harrumpher from the port-soaked right, when he denounced a "new apartheid" that was turning smokers into victims of health-fascist pass laws.
If Harris expected sympathetic outrage, he was disappointed. Forest was patronised and ignored, not only because of its faintly sick appropriation of the language of resistance to white supremacists - the tobacco market was founded on the backs of New World slaves - but because its claim to represent oppressed smokers rang false.
Eighty-five per cent of them - of us, to be confessional - say they regret their first drag. Seventy-five per cent add they want to give up but can't.
The Department of Health is eager to make good new Labour's promise to ban all tobacco advertising and sponsorship of sports, the arts and anything else that will add respectability and attract new business to companies that need to find a way of replacing the 120,000 customers they kill each year.
I've talked to ministers over the past few weeks and was surprised and impressed by their steady determination to see the job through - now they've got over the embarrassment of Bernie Ecclestone's £1 million donation to the party made in the hope of postponing the removal of fag brands from Formula One carts. I may have been conned by charming operators, but I don't think it's likely. Even Clive Bates, head of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), Big Tobacco's most relentless opponent, is delighted by the "progressive and far-sighted" government. The Tories, who once stuffed their pockets with the industry's pelf, now complain Labour isn't being tough enough.
Big Tobacco seems battered and unloved; close to emitting its last spittle-flecked and dislocating cough. Even its executives can't stomach its product any more ("We don't smoke that shit," a manager of RJ Reynolds explained to Dave Goerlitz, an actor employed to flog Winstons. "We reserve the right to sell it to the young, the poor, the black and the stupid.")
Yet in the courts of London and Brussels, the industry appears to be anything but a nervous weakling. The arrival of Labour politicians who take public health seriously has been greeted with a volley of writs. The Department of Health's press office has learnt to watch each word, after the British Tobacco Manufacturers' Association took a line from one of its statements to be deployed as evidence against the government in the Court of Appeal.
Every move ministers make is being judicially reviewed, appealed and quibbled all the way up the legal ladder. There is at least a possibility that the judiciary will be persuaded to wreck the anti-tobacco programme. The manufacturers' association, whose chairman, John Carlisle, had few difficulties with the apartheid that didn't discriminate between black smokers and non-smokers when he was a Tory MP, is now demanding that its marketing campaigns be given freedom of speech. The slogan sounds strange when it falls from the lips of an industry that has lied for nearly 50 years about the fatal consequences of smoking and the addictive seductions of nicotine.
We can say "lie" without the usual terror of libel because recent court cases in the United States - particularly in Minnesota and Florida - unearthed 35 million pages of confidential corporate memos that detailed the cynicism of the 50-year fight against tobacco regulation.
It isn't surprising that the struggle in Britain is a legal rather than a scientific conflict. From the moment that the industry's doctors warned in private that smoking killed - "With one exception," wrote a scientist for British American Tobacco in 1958 after touring the laboratories of Philip Morris, "the individuals with whom we met believed that smoking causes cancer" - the defence has been led by corporate lawyers who have deployed their arts of attack, concealment and diversion. Their achievements can be measured with reasonable precision. Between the late fifties and the present day, about six million smokers have died prematurely in Britain and 60 million worldwide.
The US disclosures include many papers from the British branches of the tobacco multinationals. To those such as your correspondent who take a rude pleasure in puffing in the snub noses of prudes when we are lectured about our lack of the required communitarian spirit, the edited highlights of the US evidence provide the best reason for quitting. They show how, well into the 1990s, the companies hired tame scientists to infiltrate institutions and covertly confuse the debate about passive smoking. Their job was to pass the blame for wheezing lungs to everything from a mysterious "sick building syndrome" - which was the health fad a few years ago - to exhaust fumes.
"Covert" may sound a melodramatic word, more usually applied to secret services running a deniable operation. But then, the descriptions found by Florida prosecutors of what the companies called "Project Whitecoat" read like an account of psychological warfare.
On 17 February 1988, representatives of Rothmans, British American Tobacco (BAT), Imperial and Gallaher were invited by Philip Morris to its headquarters in Mayfair, central London. In public, the companies insisted that they merely wanted to woo existing smokers from their ferocious commercial rivals. The thought of enticing the young to smoke for the first time had never entered their advertisers' sleek heads. Yet the meeting showed no evidence of either rivalry or disputes about market share. The proceedings had the tone of a conference of Mafia dons agreeing to combine against the Feds.
In a memorandum to her superiors, Dr Sharon Boyse, of BAT, recorded that Helmut Gaisch of Philip Morris told the meeting that everyone in the room had a common interest in keeping "the controversy [about passive smoking] alive". The company proposed to "set up a team of scientists" organised by "a national coordinating scientist" and by lawyers from Covington and Burling, a plush Washington law firm whose fees might explain why Gaisch passed round the begging bowl. "Because of the heavy financial burdens," Boyse wrote, "Philip Morris are inviting other companies to join them in these activities."
The scientists should "ideally have no previous connection with the tobacco business", the better to be believed. They would be recruited like potential agents in enemy territory. On the first approach, said Boyse, they would simply be asked if they were interested in air quality. ("tobacco is not mentioned at this stage"). Only when obvious "anti-smokers" had been filtered out would a direct approach be made. The undercover academics would be expected "to operate within the confines" of decisions taken by Philip Morris if they wanted to be paid. Lists of likely-looking pharmacologists, pathologists, environmental physiologists and consultants from British universities were passed round the room.
Whitecoat's objectives were, the next paper in the file explains, both "proactive" and "reactive". The companies would take the initiative, "reverse scientific and popular misconception that ETS [environmental tobacco smoke in offices, restaurants and the like] is harmful" and "restore the social acceptability of smoking". Defences were to be built on "the scientific and technical resources to challenge existing laws, to counter specific legislative and regulatory threats and to respond to scientific misinformation".
By 1990, Covington and Burling was able to boast of many successes. "One consultant is an adviser to a particularly relevant committee of the House of Commons." (Ash discovered that the Whitecoat in parliament was Roger Perry of Imperial College, London. Perry was unable to comment. He died from a respiratory disease.)
The International Agency for Research on Cancer also had a Whitecoat on its staff, said the lawyers, who grew bored with getting their men in other organisations and decided to found their own "learned society" - Indoor Air International. Its first three presidents were Philip Morris consultants. Many of the members did not know who was running the show, but several of the academics Boyse had heard named as potential targets were on board.
The importance of the enormous third world market - "China confounds the imagination," a Philip Morris executive was to gush later - wasn't neglected. European consultants were sent to Asia to recruit new agents to reassure governments in countries worrying about mass smoking for the first time.
Clive Bates of Ash can show that many of the scientists who claimed in the nineties that unhealthy office workers were the victims of sick building syndrome - allegedly caused by poor ventilation rather than passive smoking - were members of a Whitecoat Project that dared not speak its name. Burson Marsteller, the PR company whose clients include the genocidal Indonesian dictatorship of President Suharto, planted a series of articles about this convenient syndrome in lazy journals.
As you flick through the papers, you are struck by the scale of a propaganda offensive remarkable for its trans-continental reach and ambition. Whitecoats addressed conferences in Canada, Hanover, Budapest, Milan and Oslo.
Philip Morris knew as well as the CIA or KGB that the best propaganda has the appearance of neutrality. A conference for 100 scientists organised by "our European consultants" in Lisbon was lauded in dispatches for attracting the sponsorship of a "Portuguese university and two international scientific groups - all quite independent of the industry".
The last papers in the Whitecoat file come from 1990, and the project was closed or superseded a few years later. (A spokesman for Philip Morris said it was no longer running.) But the proactive and reactive principles of tobacco defence remain very much with us.
While the Conservatives were in power, there was little requirement to do anything except manipulate the debate. Since Labour took over, industry lawyers have stormed from their chambers with scientists close behind as the need "to counter specific legislative and regulatory threats" became palpable.
Their first action began on 6 July 1998. BAT, Gallaher, Imperial, and Rothmans - but not Philip Morris, which has taken a more conciliatory line to the new government - sought a judicial review to stop the government listening to the Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health recommendations: that advertising should be banned and smoking in public places limited. They complained that they hadn't been consulted, and said they were "stung" by the suggestion that they would think of recruiting the young.
The case was a touch weird and filled with black humour for those who knew the industry's history. Weird because it was clearly hopeless. Judicial review prevents arbitrary action by public authorities; the committee was composed of scientists with no power to act arbitrarily or otherwise. Equally peculiar was the insistence that it was a grotesque breach of all decent procedure to ignore the judgements of the industry's own experts. In the seventies, Imperial had adopted a childlike ignorance when it was faced with questions about the effects of smoke. "We do not make, indeed we are not qualified to make, medical judgements," said a wide-eyed spokesman in 1975. "We are therefore not in a position to accept or reject statements made by the minister for health."
But bleak ironies are no match for the law's delays. The case was heard and duly thrown out - on 21 December 1999.
The whole episode may seem futile - but not in the light of what we now know. Such cases create confusion, a stratagem that goes back to 1968 when Hill and Knowlton, an American PR company, advised all propagandists working for tobacco that the best headlines they could create "should strongly call out the point - Controversy! Contradiction! Other Factors! Unknowns!" Smokescreens can cover corporations that otherwise would find their rights to a hearing being dismissed by government and the media as little stronger than the rights of smack-sellers.
The bullish principles of Project Whitecoat, indeed, mandate the industry to contest everything - so civil servants and politicians will always know that, whatever they do, however strong their grounds for action, they will be harassed in the courts.
Ministers are now considering further measures.
They want to impose tougher health and safety regulations on smokers in the workplace, fight the myth that "mild" and low-tar cigarettes are safe and force the industry to list all the smoke's poisons on a back of a fag packet. They must know by now that they will have to fight for every inch of ground.
And sometimes they will be defeated. A far more serious case is going through the courts which might yet subvert new Labour's good intentions. Censorship of tobacco sponsorship and advertising is legitimised by a European Union directive, which the tobacco industry is opposing in the European Court. Frank Dobson, when he was health secretary, introduced the ban early. Big Tobacco argued that it was unlawful for the government to move until the European case had been decided. A High Court judge agreed. The Court of Appeal backed the government, but only by a majority of two-one.
Now, the industry is waiting to hear if it can appeal to the House of Lords. Even if it loses, it may win in Europe. The claim that the EU has no power to impose a common health policy is at least arguable and has won the support two of the four British judges who have heard the case to date. If the European ban is struck down, the government will almost certainly get parliament to impose a British ban.
But then, Carlisle and his friends might give up on the European Court and try the separate European Court of Human Rights and argue that their right to free speech has been denied. The options may not be limitless, but they are certainly plentiful.
Our legal and political culture is organised for the convenience of big business. I suspect that ministers are about to find how difficult it is to single out and take on just one industry.
Nick Cohen writes the Without Prejudice column for the "Observer"
