Boris JohnsonJust as I was cramming my mouth with another obesity-enhancing cheese ‘n’ mesquite-flavour kettle chip, preparatory to washing it down with a draught of life-giving milk chocolate, the phone rang. Whoaah! said my mole on the House of Commons health select committee. What are you writing about for your Telegraph column? I’m doing an elegy for Tracey Emin’s bed, I said, crunching vigorously, and I meant it, since I’m full of admiration for Charles Saatchi and what he has done for BritArt. Too bad, said my source. It’ll have to wait. We’ve got some fantastic stuff here from these health-conscious MPs. And, boy, was he right. All that is over, my friends. There is a new threat to our little ones. Its name is apple pie, and it is making them less little all the time. With every groaning axle on our blimp-like people carriers, with every squeak of the midnight fridge, with every pop of our collar buttons, the nation is getting fatter and fatter, says the health select committee – and the Government is doing nothing about it. How long can this complacency continue? ask the MPs, and they set out a series of demands. Vending machines are being used by schools to boost their budgets by ₤ 10 million. They must be scrapped, say the vigilant MPs. Planning policies must be changed so that people can get to shops on foot or by bike, say the MPs – so presumably we stand by for more government-inspired attacks on the car. Women are doing only 25 per cent of the recommended weekly quota of exercise, complain the MPs; so with any luck we can expect John Prescott, or some other lean and limber Labour minister, to lead the women of Britain in physical jerks. Most shocking of all, ministers “have spent 10 years failing to achieve a walking strategy”. That, say the MPs, is “scandalous”. Ten years! It’s far longer than that! I would say that human civilization has been deprived of a walking strategy for 40, 000 years. No, I would go further. As a species, we have been without a proper walking strategy ever since Australopithecus Africanus (or was it Homo Erectus?) first hauled himself upright. I don’t mean to be unkind to my fellow MPs, who have doubtless sat for ages devising this report – only breaking off for refreshment at the Commons heavily subsidised and choctastic canteen – but what in the name of all that’s sacred are we supposed to achieve with a “national walking strategy”? Who is going to propound this miracle method of locomotion, called putting one foot in front of the other – and who is going to pay for him or her, not to mention his car, pension and NI contributions? I know I have touched on this theme before, and I return to it only because we seem genuinely on the verge of a kind of madness. Yes, as the committee rightly says, we do all eat far too much, and yes, it does indeed involve us all, since, as Derek Wanless pointed out in his NHS forecasts, the cost of treating obesity-related conditions will rise to ₤ 30 billion per year. That is 9p on income tax, enough to make anyone sit up, no matter how big his stomach. But we do not eat too much because the Government somehow encourages us to do so. We are not a nation of fatties (and we are, amazingly, even fatter than the Americans) because of some failure of public policy. People may eat too much when they are in some way unhappy, in an act that is partly consolatory and partly self-destructive. It may be that women are so bombarded with images of perfect womanhood that they get down in the dumps and binge in a kind of mutiny. Maybe we all eat too much because we are spiritually poor, and seek the easy gratification of food. What do I know? Speaking for myself, I would say a lot of us also eat too much because we are perfectly happy, but also really rather greedy. So before we employ thousands of walking experts in the NHS, and before we roll out some vast new anti-obesity strategy, let us get some thing straight. This is not a disease. Any talk of “pandemics” or “cures” is pure cant. This is a phenomenon entirely caused by personal volition. The committee says: “Individuals cannot solve the problem as ministers seem to suppose.” But if individuals cannot solve the problem, then no one can solve the problem; because there is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge. The more the state tries to take responsibility for the problem, the less soluble the problem will become, and the more people will indeed feel that they are the “victims” of an affliction, when it is nothing but their own fat fault. The more the state prescribes the diet of children, the more it takes away responsibility from parents, and the less chance there is of genuinely persuading a child to cut down on Pringles or play more football. Rather than introducing more NHS-funded “walking strategies”, it would be far better if ministers launched a blistering attack on the compensation culture that is so inimical to sport in schools; and it would be better still if the Government did something to arrest the sale of school playing fields, which has been accelerating with almost every year since Labour came to power. Instead of whimpering about obesity, it would also be a good thing if we reclaimed the word fat. What’s wrong with it? Sometimes people call me fat. It stings. It works. And rather than engage in this pointless assault on apple pie, politicians might also speak up for motherhood. Not only are we having too few children, but motherhood, in all its aspects, is a very good way of loosing weight.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator (from The Daily Telegraph)
Notes ‘n’ – used in writing to mean ‘and’: fish ‘n’ chips / rock ‘n’ roll I’m doing an elegy for Tracey Emin’s bed… – reference to the fire in the Momart warehouse in Leyton, east London. The fire destroyed works of art worth ₤ 50 million, including 100 from the Britart collection of Charles Saatchi, Britain’s leading collector of modern art of the 1990s. Tracey Emin’s bed is mentioned in relation to her destroyed by the fire works – beach hut, called The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me, and her tent, Everyone I Ever Slept With, From 1963 To 1995. Tracey Emin – one of the artists belonging to the Britart generation of the 1990s. (Among them are also Damien Hirst, Sake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume and Martin Maloney.) And, boy, was he right. – emphatic construction = he was right choctastic – the writer’s neologism, a combination of choc olate and fan tastic NI – National Insurance NHS – National Health Service 9p – 9 pence …to make anyone sit up… – here is an example of the play on words: on the one hand, the phrasal verb sit up means ‘ show interest, surprise or fear ’, on the other hand, in the given context it can also mean ‘ rise to a sitting position from a lying position ’. If you consider the “income tax” mentioned, and the phrase “no matter how big his stomach” the play on words will become clear. Labour – the Labour Party, the political party in Britain that believes in social equality, a more equal sharing out of wealth, and the rights of workers
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