TV star Billie Piper has been slammed with criticism after she was pictured blowing cigarette smoke into the face of her 21-month-old toddler Winston.
The actress, currently starring in ITV’s raunchy Confessions of a Call Girl, was quoted in many magazines during her pregnancy as saying that she gave up the habit when she conceived her son with fellow actor Laurence Fox.
Piper has previously admitted that her greatest vices are ‘roll-up cigarettes and red wine’. After she gave birth, she said that she moved from normal cigarettes to roll-ups, as she believes they contain less chemicals.
However, during an afternoon in the beer garden of a local pub, it seems that both she and her husband became less vigilant about protecting Winston from the consequences of their habit. The Daily Mail has reported that while at the start of the session, the couple took turns to look after their son if the other needed to go off for a cigarette, as time went on they grew more relaxed about moving away when smoking.
Anti-smoking campaigners such as ASH have said that children should be protected from second-hand smoke wherever they are, as it can put them at risk of illness later in life. There have even been calls for smoking to be banned in outside public areas, such as beer gardens.
So far, there has been no comment from Piper – but our guess is that she's feeling pretty embarrassed and guilty about the whole incident.