Am I alone in not wanting to download the Covid app?

As I begin, I’m tortured by the doo-do-doo-do of The Twilight Zone’s theme music. I’ve hurtled back in time. Suddenly I’m a wise-ass, liberty-loving journalist who’s had it up to my eyeballs with intrusive, ineffectual top-down nanny-ism, and I’m pooping on yet another pitiful feint at ‘doing something’ by the lumbering big state. OK, check. This feels dead familiar. But I went to a poncier school, my hair is way weirder, and it seems that my name is Boris Johnson.

Consider this, then, an act of either plagiarism or ventriloquism. If with a tad more alliteration (I’m keener on assonance myself), Boris of a few years back would have written this very column in The Spectator. The proposition that, to improve the UK’s fat stats, we all download a government app that tracks our supermarket purchases and daily exercise (or lack thereof), purely in the hopes that for fewer calories in and more calories out we’ll earn ‘loyalty points’, which can be exchanged for shop discounts and free concert tickets, well — that’s just the sort of clumsy micromanaging that Before Boris would have mercilessly pilloried. Yet this is the very anti-obesity strategy that Born-Again Boris proposes to trial in January.

It’s unsettling enough that the Tesco algorithm is now clued up on my immoderate fondness for fine green beans. Do I really want to confess to central government my seditious attachment to French butter? Now that whether we hold our own mother’s hand is the government’s business, I guess Boris Johnson wedging uncomfortably into the child seat of my supermarket trolley was only a matter of time.

Presumably the intention is to weaponise kids. ‘Please don’t buy that Cadbury Milk bar, Mum!’ the urchins will plead. ‘It’ll cost us seven points! If you get broccoli instead, we’ve almost enough points to see Beyoncé in October!’ Really? Even if parents are goaded to load up on more vegetables, Brits presently throw away £2.5