Jog on

Forget the cigar, the homburg and the V-for-victory sign. If Winston Churchill were around today, he’d be pounding the streets in T-shirt, shorts and chunky trainers. Jogging is an almost compulsory obsession for any Tory alpha male. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are forever out running; Michael Gove has lost a drastic amount of weight racing around west London; and Boris has revealed he’s down to 15 and a half stone, from 16 and a half.

He’s also declared he’d freeze obesity taxes on fattening food — the answer to losing weight was more exercise, he said — and admitted to failing to keep up a vegan diet (he likes cheese too much). But he is certainly looking slimmer since he started going out with Carrie Symonds, 24 years his junior. If he can’t shrink the age gap, he can shrink the weight gap. When he was foreign secretary, he used to go jogging with his security team. ‘We used to get up at six o’clock every morning wherever we were and do a very, very lackadaisical run around whatever national landmark — Red Square, Sydney Harbour,’ he explained, in a recent Spectator interview.

The jogging craze began with the previous Conservative administration. Both David Cameron and George Osborne graduated from biking to work (before they rose to power) to jogging around the streets of Westminster once they were in office. It’s largely a male thing, and a generational thing too. Theresa May (born 1956) wouldn’t be seen dead in a singlet. And can you imagine Margaret Thatcher (born 1925) in a pair of trainers? The new generation of jogging Tories were born within a seven-year period: Boris Johnson (1964), Jeremy Hunt (1966), David Cameron (1966), Michael Gove (1967) and George Osborne (1971).