By now, you've seen the colour of the chancellor's NHS money, heard all about Welfare to Work initiatives in the service, even seen pre-Budget photos of Uncle Gordon playing with the kids. Someone else's kids to be sure (dammit, it's still someone else's upbeat economy too: Ken Clarke's), but they're all steps in the right direction.

Now back to real life: cancer. The other morning I listened to Tory ex- MP John Carlisle, now lobbyist for the Tobacco Manufacturers Association (TMA), using the industry's usual weasel words to explain away (yet another) embarrassing report. 'Not as clear-cut as the anti-smoking lobby would like,' he said. I couldn't help laughing.

When he was MP for Luton North, Mr Carlisle used to defend apartheid with equal charm. His appeal to the TMA must be that he's a boiler-plate toughie. The past week has seen evidence from the World Health Organisation, from the Scientific Committee (SCOTH), and that leaked 1970 research report from Gallaher, makers of Benson and Hedges and Silk Cut, admitting the tobacco/cancer link. But people like Mr Carlisle keep denying it - at least in Britain.

It's a mixture of legal and marketing strategy, and it makes anti-smoking MPs like Labour's Kevin Barron very angry. The Rotherham MP was author of the abortive bill to ban tobacco ads, and recently showed me a pile of lobbyists' memos revealing how hard they work behind the Westminster scenes to square or squash backbenchers.

Yet I suspect Mr Barron is doing better than he fears. In the US the industry is poised to do a deal which will see it pay out $368bn in damages and curb its aggressive advertising in return for limited immunity to future law suits. In the face of horrendous evidence of past misdeeds, Big Tobacco - America's oldest, 17th-century industry - is in full retreat in its home market.

Thus the people campaigning hardest against the pounds368bn payout are US anti-smokers, though Martin Broughton, head of the British-owned BAT - a big player in the US - is pugnaciously out of step with touchy-feely American colleagues and their 'naive and parochial' local culture, according to my old chum, Peter Pringle, author of a soon-out book, Dirty Business: big tobacco at the bar of justice.

Parochial or not, Europe often follows the US lead, despite the huge power of the industry's lobby, made so clear by Helmut Kohl's resistance to the advertising ban on Formula 1 racing. But the F1 ban is coming. Dobbo and Tessa Jowell were squaring the Greeks the other day on the terms of the Euro-ban, important when you remember their EU-subsidised tobacco farms. As for Mr Kohl, he looks like a man on the way out.

The Sunday Telegraph made a good fist of claiming that the WHO report established only limited claims for the risks of passive smoking. But when its daily sister joins the tabloids in screaming 'Smoking in the home kills babies' across page one, you feel the game is up. Yet ministers remain wary of laws to ban smoking in public places. Frank Dobson dislikes what he calls 'health fascism' - which is rampant in the neurotic US. He prefers voluntary codes.

Since I increasingly dislike both fads and bossiness as I get older, I agree, noting in passing that unfashionable prostate cancer is going to be the number one killer in 20 years, according to the Cancer Research Institute. Just in time to get me, I expect, though the bowel cancer lobby was busy in the Commons this week. As with the space industry's promotion of that rogue meteorite, the one due to cure all cancer cases on earth on 26 April 2028, you have to shout nowadays to get attention - and Gordon Brown's cash.

To test my own limp-wristed reaction I asked a chum whose smoker husband has just died of lung cancer. She supports the Dobson line, too. 'I just wish people wouldn't smoke,' she said wistfully. At this point, Teddy Goldsmith, ecologist brother of billionaire Jimmy, whom the Big C got last year, would interject that it's the wider chemical culture surrounding us, mostly in our food, which is the real cause of the cancer explosion.

And skin cancers, reported in last week's Journal, are also linked to chemical damage to the atmosphere. Diet and the environment, as well as smoking, cause cancer, Minister Milburn acknowledged in the Commons only the other day. Cancer costs the NHS 7 per cent of its budget.