I can confirm this. He paid an extra 600 quid a night at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester so that he could smoke inside - that would be the fine for one of us (assuming we can afford a night at the Rad in the first place) if we lit up in the hotel room.
I'm not a fan, but I feel sad about this and I'm hoping the blind is fake. Also, although we love to gossip and speculate, talking about someone's potential life limiting illness seems a bit too intrusive. Everyone deals with illness in their own way. Jade Goody, Bernie Nolan and Lynda Bellingham all shared their cancer journey with the public. Louis Tomlinson's mother Jay, Victoria Wood and David Bowie chose not to.
I work in palliative care and there are patients who want family and friends around them at the end, and others who want to be left alone. One patient said to me 'I want people to remember me for who I was, not some poor sod dying in a hospital bed and I don't want anyone to see me'.