[2] In the 1990s, Imperial Tobacco launched an advertising campaign featuring an everyman named Reg who offered his dad-humour insights on various subjects.

[4] In April 2002, The Daily Telegraph reported that middlemen were offering supposedly duty-free Regal and Silk Cut cigarettes to consumers.

These products turned out to be illegally counterfeited in Chinese factories on the border between Fujian and Guangdong provinces and were highly toxic.

Alongside the health risks of smoking, the cigarettes were produced in unhygienic factory conditions and included tobacco sweepings, sawdust, dirt, banned chemicals as well as high levels of tar and nicotine.

These counterfeits cost £2.5 billion in lost revenue in 2001 and were thought to account for 'at least a quarter of all the cigarettes smoked in Britain' in that year according to HM Treasury.