Maybe the ferocity against Barack Obama in America is generated less by the colour of his skin than by the fact that he still has the odd cigarette. He has always been splendidly honest about this. Unlike Bill Clinton, who lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the current president refuses to lie about his smoking (which many may regard as a more grievous offence than a sexual misdemeanour). Even after signing into law a new anti-smoking measure, he confessed to having "sometimes fallen off the wagon" in his struggle to quit.

To say this in the current American climate is brave; for the country seems to be moving inexorably towards prohibition. By admitting to being even an occasional smoker, Obama identifies himself with an minority that is now more likely to suffer discrimination than any ethnic minority group. The Mayor of New York, a former smoker himself, has even encouraged the harassment of smokers by saying that giving them "a not particularly nice look" when passing them in the street has shown that "social pressure really does work".

New Yorkers light up in the street because they are mostly forbidden to do so indoors; but even their right to smoke in the open air is under threat. The city's health commissioner, Thomas Farley, has said that he wants to ban smoking in New York's 1,700 parks and playgrounds, and on its 14 miles of beaches – a first step, one would guess, towards banning it everywhere. The mayor seems to have been taken by surprise by Dr Farley's plan, but he did not rule it out. He said that he wanted first "to see if smoking in parks has a negative impact on people's health", which is just about as verifiable as the existence of God. As he campaigns for re-election, however, he probably just wants to see what the popular reaction is, for he himself is as much an anti-smoking fanatic as Adolf Hitler and King James I of England before him.

In the circumstances, I was pleased to see a headline in the New York Times reading "Proposal of Smoking Ban Stirs a Sense of Tolerance", but the story below was not particularly encouraging. It reflected widespread scepticism about how such a ban could be enforced and also the view that other smells, like those of food or perfume, could be just as offensive as the smell of tobacco smoke. One libertarian even imagined a Soviet-style future in which people might be arrested for having nicotine-stained fingers. But the predominant impression was one of fatalism, with nobody willing to resist any anti-smoking measure and even smokers feeling too dispirited to protest.

It would be nice to think that London might replace New York as the most free and most tolerant of the world's great cities, but of course it won't. If it is true to form, it will just do whatever New York does a year or two later. The refusal of the council in Richmond, on the outskirts of London, to allow a photograph of Lynn Barber smoking a cigarette to be used in publicity for its literary festival was typical of local government attitudes in the capital. And these attitudes prevail throughout Europe. Even in France, a publisher has reportedly delayed publication of the autobiography of President Jacques Chirac because its cover photograph shows him with a cigarette between his fingers.

Our only hope is Boris Johnson. When he was running for the mayoralty, he was brave enough to question the national smoking ban in pubs and clubs. "What is the point of having local democracy if we don't leave decisions like this to a local level?" he asked. But the "sense of tolerance" that the New York Times thought it detected at home is as weak here as it is there, and Boris, Mayor Bloomberg's new best buddy, will doubtless find that there is no political future in it.

Floyd on fame

Keith Floyd, the famous television chef who has died after a luncheon of oysters and partridge and wine and cigarettes, did not set an example of healthy living, but he offered reassurance to those of us who suffer from envy of celebrities. He reminded me a bit of Jeffrey Bernard, a similarly dissolute character, who relished the fame brought to him by the late Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell but reacted furiously whenever an admirer came up to talk to him.

Floyd, in his posthumous memoirs, wrote that "fame can give riches, but it has no respect for reality; it does not appreciate personal lives, family, the home". "When I became famous," he went on, "people with whom I didn't want to be friends befriended me without asking my permission . . . I feared walking into a bar because I knew that to do so would involve signing autographs on wine glasses and answering queries about cooking."

He also recognised at an early stage that the popularity of television cookery, for which he was largely responsible, was a shallow phenomenon. He predicted years ago that "one day TV cooks will be as famous as racing-car drivers and rock stars", but also noted in 2001 that, "We've become a nation of voyeurs. We don't cook any more, we just watch TV programmes about cookery . . . It makes me terribly sad." Eight years later, in an interview yesterday, Tom Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall's son, was saying exactly the same thing.