Teens are an easy target for vaping firms with their cool, slim devices

Last Friday my son celebrated his 12th birthday with a trip to the cinema, followed by a bunch of boys piling back to ours to sleep over (I discovered them trying to do “The 24-hour Challenge” at 3am). In general, boys are several grades more innocent than girls at the same age, so I was horrified to discover one of them with a vape.

I performed that parental cliché: standing palm outstretched, demanding that he hand it over. There was the inevitable pause, blink, attempted denial, then the poor child put his hand into his pocket and retrieved the contraption — which, incidentally, had its own expensive leather pouch — and surrendered it with a whispered “Sorry”. He assured me the e-cigarette wasn’t “charged”, had no “pods” (capsules that deliver nicotine) and actually belonged to his 13-year-old sister. Quite possibly: I’ve confiscated these devices twice before, both times from teens.

One of those was from a 14-year-old who told me it was “just a strawberry-flavoured vape” with “zero milligrams of nicotine” and showed me the contents in a bottle — on which there was a “not for sale to under-18s” stamp. Anyway, this new one was a Juul, a slim electronic device, the sort of cool thing that would appeal to smartphone-obsessed generation Z. The capsules contain 1.7 per cent nicotine and come in mango and apple flavours (with obvious parallels to alcopops).

This week the Food and Drug Administration in the US is banning the sale of fruit and candy-flavoured e-cigarettes in convenience stores and petrol stations. Federal data showed teen use surged more than 75 per cent since last year following a vaping “epidemic” among teens.

Sales of Juul devices jumped from 2.2 million in 2016 to 16.2 million last year in the US. On its UK website, Juul Labs cites its mission statement “to eliminate cigarettes”. But it’s not just ex-smokers who are getting hooked.

Beware pitfalls of the comeback trail

David Miliband’s rumoured return to British politics was heralded in this weekend’s newspapers, conjuring images of the exiled New Labour prince riding back into town to save the party from the dithering clutches of Jeremy Corbyn.

Such political returns are risky. For instance, Ayatollah Khomeini was greeted with fanfare when he returned to Tehran from Paris in 1979 (and sadly, his legacy still persists), whereas Ahmed Chalabi’s triumphant return to Iraq in 2003 after 20 years in the US was a damp squib met by much muttering of “where the hell were you when it mattered?”

Yes, James was made of the right stuff

LBC host James O’Brien has written a book called How To Be Right. I like to think that he learned everything about “debating” from the two years we sat next to each other at the Express, most of which we spent squabbling like overtired siblings.

We bickered about whose stories were better, who had more contacts, who was more senior in the desk hierarchy (we were the same). We were both initiated in a “baptism by fire” lunch with a senior editor (five bottles between three), which O’Brien slept off wrapped around an enormous plant in the office foyer.

We attended “celebrity” events, once flanking Dame Barbara Cartland, who retrieved a false eyelash from her salad and stuck it back on, only to discover it was an insect. We were both ambitious — “terrified of missing the metaphorical bus”, as he put it.

Once summoned to “appraise” ourselves by HR, we were separately asked how much we thought we should earn and where we saw ourselves in five years’ time.

While I showed pathetic gratitude just to have a wage, O’Brien tripled his salary expectation and declared he’d be running his own department before the time was up.

Four years later he did his first LBC shift. Yup, that boy was right all right.

Gwynnie’s surprise vagina monologue

I had a fine hour interviewing Gwyneth Paltrow for ES magazine (out in January), some of which was spent on the subject synonymous with the actor and her firm, Goop — “bodily wellness”. Later, I was carting my tape recorder across the British Library when a book pressed against the “play” button. The hush of Humanities 2 was broken and as I grappled to find “off”, a section of the tape played in which Paltrow repeated the word “vagina”.