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.