Caroline Flint’s appointment as Minister of Fitness strikes many as absurd. Is she going to become a modern version of the instructor who appears on “telescreens” in George Orwell’s 1984? If like, Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, we take a rest, will we hear her voice screeching from a screen: “Smith! 6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade.”
Presumably not, although you can never be sure with New Labour. But if a minister in a democracy can’t compel free citizens to start jogging and stop scoffing, what’s the point of her?
Her announcement yesterday that she wanted super-markets to give demonstrations to customers on how to eat fruit, added to the air of futility that surrounds her. Do we need to be taught how to peel a banana?
I’m sorry to say that many of us do. The statistics about childhood obesity tripling in 20 years have impressed me, and I won’t forget a consultant who told me that our children’s generation could be the first since the Industrial Revolution to have a lower average life expectancy than their parents’ enjoyed. More telling to me and I suspect to anyone of my age, is the memory of how Londoners looked 25 years ago. The very shape of the people on the streets has changed, particularly in the poorer districts.
When funeral directors complained this week that their pallbearers are finding it increasingly difficult to carry coffins, even Telegraph readers who harrumph about the “nanny state” in the nineteenth hole should have realised it was time for some hard thinking about how to improve public health.
At least Flint has made a start. However silly her banana-peeling classes sound, they recognise that millions of people don’t know what to do with fruit and vegetables: how to buy, prepare and eat them.
If her exhortations to the supermarkets to help reduce the highest levels of obesity in Europe go unheeded, she could get tougher. For instance, Sainsbury, Asda and Waitrose have agreed to use red, amber and green labels to warn shoppers of high, medium and low levels of salt, fat and sugar. Good for them, it is a simple system everyone can understand. But Tesco prefers its obscure labels and is refusing to cooperate. If it doesn’t back down, the government should put the public interest before the interest of the Tesco share-holders and make the warnings compulsory.
Similarly, Tony Blair says he will ban on junk food adverts aimed at children if the advertising industry doesn’t clean up its act. I hope he soon realises that responsible junk food ads are impossible to make and imposes a ban before anymore time is wasted.
Compulsory warnings and the ending of exploitative advertising aren’t the actions of Big Brother or the nanny state. They are reasonable measures for a free society to take to protect its citizens.
THE BBC’s Robin Hood is not only a ripping yarn for boys of all ages, but also marks the breakout from the Westminster village of the Blairite caricature of Gordon Brown. Keith Allen said that he was playing Sheriff of Nottingham as “a sociopath, who is utterly asexual, devilishly charming and very politically ambitious. I think he sees himself as a future dictator of England. I’ve based him on Gordon Brown.”
In my admittedly limited experience of the Chancellor, there’s not much truth in this, but if I were in the Brown camp I’d be worried. For it is one thing for Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn to whisper to Westminster journalists with declining readerships that Brown is a comic-strip villain, quite another for that cartoon to make it into prime-time drama.
NOWHERE in his self-pitying diary entries about his fall from power does David Blunkett ask himself what good a working-class minister expected to come from mixing with the dissipated Tories at the Spectator. If he had behaved like a decent Labour MP and just had an affair with his secretary, he would be in the running to be our next Prime Minister. As it was, he placed himself in the power of old Etonian Thatcherites and New York socialites, who naturally turned on him when the relationship soured.
If you think I’m being a class warrior, imagine you are friends with a Conservative politician and catch him making eyes at the managing director of the New Statesman. Surely, you would warn him that a left-wing magazine full of his political enemies was not the place to go looking for a potentially dangerous liaison. Blunkett’s tragedy – and there is a touch of the tragic about him – is that the fragrant Kimberly Quinn’s perfume was so over-powering he couldn’t scent trouble .
AFTER SPENDING years trudging the wings and observing the inmates, Sir Stephen Tumim, the late Chief Inspector of Prisons, came up with a formula that may help John Reid as he tries to decide who to release as the overcrowding crisis deepens.
“Half the people in jail should never have been sent in,” said the great man. “The other half should never be let out.” The tricky bit, of course, is working out which half is which.
Nick Cohen
