Is Rebus Down To His Last Cigarette, Or Have The Affairs Of Our Funny Wee Country Slipped Beyond Parody? (NB - The Answers Are Not Mutually Exclusive)

The friction between Scotland and England is a source of much merriment, the latest example of which is the campaign by the Scottish National Party to send a Scottish football team to the London Olympics in 2012. The idea is absurd, but the fact that it is treated as a serious proposition by the country's second-most popular party is an indictation of how trivial Scottish politics have become.
But new heights of absurdity were reached by the Times newspaper today, which ran a story by its Scotland correspondent suggesting that Detective Inspector John Rebus, "the overweight, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking loner" created by the writer Mr Ian Rankin might be forced to emigrate South as a result of the imminent ban on smoking in Scottish bars.
The last time I looked, DI Rebus was a fictional character. He is free to live wherever Mr Rankin plants him. But when did the news pages of the Times start to concern themselves with fantasy?