“Big Tobacco is not investing in e-cigarettes to wean itself off cigarette sales,” he says.

“Its recent oleaginous rhetoric about them saving lives is utter duplicity. As with other forms of smokeless tobacco, Big Tobacco wants smokers to use e-cigarettes as well as cigarettes, not instead of them.

“Urged on by myopic health professionals who seem to have lost any population health focus they might have had, this may become one of the biggest blunders of modern public health.”