War Orphans, Cough Up

Followers of Ken Clarke's transformation from Thatcherite minister into the sensible moderate Baron Clarke of Nottingham will doubtless remember his stint as director and deputy chair of British American Tobacco, whose fetching combination of entrepreneurship and decency is once more on display. The company's Pakistani subsidiary is leaning on the health ministry to relax its restrictions on exporting cigarettes in packs of ten, because thanks to the civil war in Sudan the juvenile market there has nothing better to spend its money on. The need to export to Sudan is particularly urgent at the moment, as the location of BAT's Sudanese subsidiary has been caught up in such heavy fighting as to make the sale of addictive carcinogens to war-zone-resident minors economically unfeasible. Along with several dozen similarly unenlightened nations Pakistan prohibits the manufacture and sale of cigarettes in ten-packs, whereas Sudan takes a more laissez-faire view; and British American Tobacco has pointed out that the money would flow into Pakistan while the cancers would appear, if at all, only at a safe distance.