Career advice

My boy left school at the end of last term, aged 16. He can read and write after a fashion, and he knows something about the rise and fall of the Nazi party and how to make delicious scones, so all in all a good result.

After he’d been at home for a week his mother’s boyfriend asked him what he was going to do for a living. My boy said he wanted to be a businessman. My boy’s mother’s boyfriend — an unbelievably decent, hardworking, teetotal, pigeon-shooting man — scoffed. This led to some hard words being said on both sides, which made my boy’s mother weep and left an unpleasant atmosphere in the humble but normally harmonious home.

So when he came to stay at the weekend I sat my boy down and gave him some fatherly advice. What about becoming a tobacco smuggler? I suggested. Everyone that smokes around here smokes Golden Virginia hand-rolling tobacco that has been smuggled into the country. Costing nearly £10 in the shops over here, the going rate for a 50-gram pouch of illegally imported tobacco is a fiver. Petrol prices may fluctuate; the cost of a pint of beer may vary enormously; but a moody packet of Golden Virginia has cost a fiver for as long as anyone can remember. If Britain ever descends into full anarchy, it would probably become the principal unit of exchange.

And there seems to be ample room in the marketplace at present for a keen young operator to set out his stall. As my boy’s mother indignantly tells me, the usual source of smuggled Golden Virginia on her council estate has had his van confiscated. And at the local bar I go to, popular with travellers and space cadets, smuggled tobacco is harder to obtain, I’ve heard tell, than methamphetamine. An acute local shortage such as this is exactly the kind of window of opportunity, I said to my boy as a sort of peroration, that one hears spoken of nostalgically by retired captains of industry on Desert Island Discs. Foreign travel, huge profits, zero tax and the gratitude of the local community — what more could one ask, I said, from one’s first job?

The tablets the doctor recently gave my boy for his migraines are powerfully narcotic. It’s like talking to a gonk. I took his look of stupefaction for assent, however, and, caring parent that I am, logged on and booked us a bargain three-day ‘mini-cruise’ to Spain and back as foot passengers on the car ferry, sailing next day.

Then, like Captain Mainwaring addressing his platoon, I outlined the plan. In Spain, I said, we’d ascertain the price of tobacco; we’d buy the legal maximum of three kilos of tobacco each; and we’d note the presence or absence of customs officers at Plymouth, our port of re-entry. My kick-start investment in his new business will be the cost of our mini-cruise plus my three kilos. In theory, there’s no upper legal limit for tobacco — if passengers can convince HM Customs that it’s all for their own personal ill-heath. Rhetorical skills should be unnecessary, however, because the state no longer sees fit to have a branch of HM Customs based permanently at Plymouth ferry port. From the sale of the six kilos — 120 packs — he will be able to generate enough cash to finance an even larger consignment — should he decide that a life on the ocean wave was for him.

There was, I now admit, an element of self-love in my nurturing gesture. After the rigours of The Spectator Summer Party, relaxing for three days on a sun-lounger, even if it was on a car ferry in the Bay of Biscay, was exactly what was needed to restore and refresh the cells. To be also nurturing an entrepreneurial seedling while lying inert with the sun on my eyelids seemed to be the perfect economy.

The only effort required on my part was to step off the gangplank at one point and stroll around Spain in the cool of the early morning. Spain! Simply being alive and in Spain, among Spaniards, those most human of human beings, albeit for two hours maximum, was enough to make me entirely glad.

My boy, however, kept his eye on the ball and maintained a businesslike attitude, noting down the price of fags on his pocket calculator and working out profit margins. I watched his furrowed brow as chic and willowy Santander women, almost all of them with a fag, and elderly midgets passed between us, and I thought ‘That’s my boy doing that!’

School leavers! No job, my lovelies? No qualifications? In a kleptocracy, tax evasion is a patriotic duty. Our borders are wide open. Golden Virginia, in Spain, is £2.30 a packet. Recompense yourselves, my beauties, for the years that the locusts have eaten!