Hey Ian, congratulations on the hba1c result, that's amazing! Having talked with you quite a bit on here, I'm so pleased to see you've achieved this.
For reference, my last cholesterol results in November were as follows:
My DN recommended I start on a statin. Current NHS guidelines state "
The NHS recommends the use of statins for primary prevention in people with Type 2 Diabetes that have a risk of having a Cardiovascular Event of greater than 10 % over the next 10 years. This risk is calculated by your Healthcare Practitioner and helps you to make your decision." From what I can tell, this essentially means most T2D patients are automatically recommended to be on a statin. Therefore, your results are definitely in ranges which would see that as the textbook recommendation. I declined to start on a statin, at that point I'd lost a significant amount of weight (which can send your cholesterol wonky, even my nurse agreed), I've lost more since then too (over 7 stone since diagnosis now), so I've made peace with my decision on the basis that weight loss will have (and has already had) significant benefits for a number of my health conditions and I don't want potential statin side effects to jeopardise that progress.
I'm not medically qualified though and I won't for a single second claim to know which of the two prominent theories on cholesterol are correct. At the end of the day, we need to decide what's right for us, based on the information we have to hand and our understanding of it.
In short, it's not an easy decision. Smoking is a massive risk factor, so as an ex-smoker myself (and an enthusiastic smoker back in my day), I'd possibly recommend tackling that whichever way you decide when it comes to statins.
Edit - Just in case you think you quitting is impossible, here's a post I made previously about my experience -
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/ive-been-very-very-very-stupid.200049/post-2650519