In less than a week we will go to the polls. Not for the General Election Theresa May promised wouldn’t happen until 2020 – the snap election’s not quite as snappy as that. The June 8 showdown has rather stolen the limelight, but next Thursday’s long-planned county council contest is still a significant date on Britain’s political calendar.

It will be seen, inevitably, as a guide to the mood of the nation in the run-up to the main event. But it’s not really about national issues – or shouldn’t be. It’s about who runs a tier of government that can impinge on our daily lives as much as what happens in Westminster, and arguably ought to matter more.

I’ve said for years that if there are too many layers of government ruling over us, the one to scrap should be Westminster. We weren’t offered that option in last year’s referendum, were we?

Lucky voters in Felixstowe will get the chance on Thursday to put their cross next to my name. I’m standing for the Green Party, because that’s the party whose principles come closest to matching my own deep convictions. I shall vote that way in June, too.

But I’ll do both with a horrible awareness that it’s the opposite of tactical voting. That in our insane, antiquated, first-past-the-post system the effect of voting for your principles can be to let the least principled contender take the prize.

The system is in desperate, urgent need of reform. Trouble is, the people in power – whoever they are at any given time – are always the people least likely to want to fix the broken system that put them there.

Barely more than a quarter of the possible electorate actually voted in 2015 for a Tory government. Yet that’s what we got. Between them, the LibDems, Greens and UKIP won almost 25 per cent of the vote but now have just 10 MPs out of 650. Talk about “taking back control”.

The always interesting blogger Thomas G Clark (“Another Angry Voice”) has put forward what he calls “an idea to give the complacent Tories a shock they’d never forget”.

In a nutshell, he suggests that all those parties – and there are plenty of them – who want June to bring the end of May should get their acts together and agree to field what he calls Unity candidates.

Not in every constituency. Just in all those marginal seats where the Electoral Commission is now investigating claims of electoral fraud. (Was this investigation the real reason May suddenly changed her mind over holding an early election?)

And – this is the point I really like – choosing a genuine expert to go up against each unqualified member of May’s Cabinet.

So, an NHS doctor to challenge Jeremy Hunt; someone with actual legal qualifications to take on Liz Truss; an economist against Philip Hammond; someone who knows something about the environment to face Andrea Leadsom; a teacher to tackle Justine Greening, and so on.

It’s a great idea with only one downside. It’ll never happen.

And that’s not just because May deliberately gave the opposition too little time to get itself organised. It’s because neither Labour nor the LibDems has the grace or vision of a Caroline Lucas or Nicola Sturgeon.
Because Jeremy Corbyn – a nice man whose policies are nearly all excellent – is too stuck in the tribal past to give those policies a fighting chance.

Because – to paraphrase Monty Python – the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea are too busy squaring up against each other to collaborate in getting rid of the Romans.

How times change. My daughter, who’ll be off to university this year, has never known a world without the internet. She can barely remember life without smartphones and social media. She’d struggle to see, breathe – or believe – in the kind of atmosphere that was normal in every pub not so very long ago.

And not only in pubs either. It was 30 years ago this week that I gave up smoking at work. My colleagues in a new job made it clear they’d prefer me not to bring the pipe with which I’d polluted my previous department.
Not long afterwards I abandoned the habit entirely. I discovered that waking up every morning with sinusitis and a throat tasting of ashes was not a natural or necessary aspect of life.

Half my life ago. Yet a whiff of pipe smoke in the street can still bring a brief pang of nostalgia. Not, I think, that I was ever addicted. But I liked the fiddle and paraphernalia of pipesmoking. I liked the pipe as an object. And yes, I liked the smell and taste of some tobaccos.

Which is why I think if e-cigarettes had been around then, I might have switched from smoking to vaping.
And where would I be now if it had been available and I had? Who knows?

At this point I should admit a special interest. Among my other jobs I work on a website dedicated to e-cigarettes – every aspect, from marketing to science and health, and the different regulations that apply around the world. It’s all surprising interesting.

In a sense, then, I am in the pay of the vaping industry. But I and the company are strictly independent and impartial. The information we impart to companies, researchers and legislators wouldn’t be much use if we weren’t.

I’ve never tried vaping. Frankly, I’d rather go back to the old pipe. But I do know something about the subject.

I know, for example, that Britain – especially England – is probably the most e-cig-friendly country in the world.
A country which advises: “An expert review of the latest evidence concludes that e-cigarettes are around 95 per cent safer than smoked tobacco and they can help smokers to quit.”

That’s from Public Health England. This is from the Royal College of Physicians: “E-cigarettes are likely to be beneficial to UK public health.”

And this is the British Lung Foundation: “Given half of long-term smokers die as a result of their habit, using vaping to help someone quit smoking could literally save their life.”

Other supporters of e-cigs include Cancer Research and the British Heart Foundation.

Contrast this with countries like Australia, where e-liquids containing nicotine are illegal; India, where four states have banned vaping; or Indonesia, which seems to be heading towards an outright ban.

A cynic might link some countries’ tight regulation to the importance of their tobacco industries, and the tax revenues they get from smokers. But it also fits with the advice of the World Health Organization, which recommends tight restrictions on the sale and promotion of e-cigs, maybe prohibition.

The WHO even calls the things ENDS, which stands for Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems, but also seems symbolic.

The UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies doesn’t think much of Dr WHO’s advice. In a long list of charges, it concludes: “The WHO report does not acknowledge that significant restrictions on e-cigarettes could lead to unintended consequences, including increases in smoking.”

Vaping, of course, can be a trendy lifestyle choice as well as a way to quit fags. No one, as far as I know, ever chased the dragon with Embassy Regal.

And support for e-cigs should come with this reservation. They may not bring the same dangers as smoking – in fact, they clearly don’t – but of the long-term effects of inhaling flavoured, nicotine-loaded vapour, there is only one thing we can say with confidence. It’s too early to tell.

Interesting fact of the week: cigarettes contain added sugar. In the case of “American blend” cigarettes, it can make up 20 per cent of the weight.

This may be one of the reasons people often pile on the pounds when they give up smoking. Their bodies are finding a different way to get a constant hit of the drug they really crave. Sugar.

Interesting fact number two: in 1715, when Britain’s sugar habit was starting to cause concern, consumption in this sweet-obsessed land was about 5lb per person per year. Today it’s normal to consume 20 or 30 times that much.

No wonder Public Health England is challenging businesses to cut sugar by five per cent this year and 20 per cent by 2020. Though this may be a bit like switching to low tar cigarettes – or jumping from the 30th floor instead of the 31st.

I don’t have a very sweet tooth. I can’t stand sugary drinks like Coke or lemonade, I don’t take sugar in tea or coffee, and I try to limit my intake of cakes, biscuits and chocolate. We eat toast, not sugary cereals, for breakfast. And I’m never hungry enough to fob my body off with the sugar-and-fat concoctions of fast-food outlets. I try in general to avoid “processed food” of all kinds – that stuff the writer Michael Pollan memorably dubbed “edible foodlike substances”. Oh, and I don’t smoke either.

Nevertheless, there’s sugar in that toast. I know just how much, because I put it there myself, in the form of malt, when I bake the bread. In shop-bought loaves, there is probably more. Then I like to smother it in peanut butter (6.2pc sugar) or marmalade (a whacking 63pc).

There’s hardly a tin, a jar or a bottle in the cupboard that doesn’t contain some sugar. It’s the ingredient no food manufacturer can leave out if they want people to keep buying.

David Attenborough once suggested that one way to look at human life was to consider that the “purpose” of our species was to facilitate the spread of grass –lawns, parks and grazing lands, vast fields of wheat, barley and rice.

But grass is not the only type of plant to have made use of humans in this way. Sugar may be a latecomer to the game, but it has done a fabulous job of replicating itself over the past 350 years or so.

Grass did it by feeding us, and enabling us to multiply across the planet. Sugar got us hooked.

Our parents use it to pacify us, we get high, then come down and go wild demanding more. The addictive process is well outlined by science writer Gary Taubes in his book The Case Against Sugar. And as he says: “Once people are exposed, they consume as much sugar as they can easily procure.”

He also quotes Oscar Wilde on “the perfect pleasure”: “It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

Wilde was writing about cigarettes, but the same applies to sugar. And what better definition could there be of an addictive drug?

The British empire-building rush for coffee, tea and chocolate came only after people started adding sugar. And the link with tobacco goes back to the “triangular trade” which began in  the late 16th century.

British ships carried slaves to the Caribbean, where they worked raising sugar to ship back to Britain and Europe. When the early American colonies joined in, tobacco was added to the eastbound leg of the triangle – and to the slaves’ labours.

Cities like Liverpool and Bristol were built on that 250-year trade. And so, in a sense, was the United States, its history steeped from the beginning in racial exploitation and a kind of drug-trafficking.

Another spoonful of sugar in your tea?