Obesity

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

How strong is the link between obesity and the danger of dying from Covid? Yesterday, the World Obesity Federation published a report containing a widely-quoted statistic that 2.2 million out of 2.5 million Covid deaths globally have occurred in countries where more than half the population is overweight. The figure is stark, although also highly unsatisfactory. Obesity tends to be more prevalent in wealthy countries – which also happen to have more aged populations, another strong risk factor in Covid deaths. Yet the report also collates a substantial body of evidence linking obesity more directly with Covid deaths. Among the findings reported around the world is a British study finding

It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after I became editor. The paper has been part of my life for a very long time. When I was at school, more than 70 years ago, we were all told to read Harold Nicolson’s column every week, to learn the art of essay-writing. I like to think that it was still a good paper in my time, but it is a much better one now. Fraser Nelson and his team are doing an excellent job. Our lives remain dominated by the plague, aka Covid-19. The government’s handling of it —

Tackling obesity is the latest government initiative, universally condemned as nannying. Ask a Spartan. From an early age, Spartan children were taught not to be fussy: to eat up their food, and not to fear the dark or being left alone. At the age of seven, boys were taken from their homes and lived together in ‘herds’, exercising bare-footed and often naked, keeping fit and learning obedience. Food was sparse, because ‘overeating produces a broad, squat frame, and laboured breathing’. Lean features ‘defined the body’s true shape’, unlike obese ones. Competitive games were fostered, winners encouraged and a proud mental resilience developed. Now that’s nannying: the full Rees-Mogg. Other Greeks

One of the genuine pleasures I always take in arriving back in the north-east after being in London is that I am suddenly transformed from being an aged fat pig with bad teeth into a youthful, lissome creature with teeth no different to anybody else. It is not the clean air or the glorious countryside which has this effect; it’s just that everything is comparative. Giles Coren once observed that for every 50 miles you travel away from our capital, you go back in time about ten years. If this is true — and I suspect it is — then up here on Teesside we’re in the middle of that

Just back from a few days in Rome — the perfect small metropolis for ‘street-haunting’, as Cyril Connolly described his love of strolling through cities. I first went to Rome in 1976, aiming to interview — for my university magazine — three of the writers who lived there or thereabouts at the time. I duly wrote to Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. All of them politely turned me down but I went anyway and have revisited the city many times. In fact, in the way life sometimes arranges these things, I later met all three writers and even came to know Burgess and Vidal a bit. As reading

From 30 March next year, of course, we will no longer be subject to all those silly EU laws on bent bananas (which was genuine, not a myth), toasters, balloons and all the rest. Instead we will be able to concentrate on passing our own good old British silly laws. Even the European Commission never came up with the idea of limiting pies to 695 calories. So bravo, then, to Public Health England for having the imagination to out-Brussels Brussels. Today, the quango unveils its latest strategy in fighting obesity: regulating portion sizes. As well as regulating pies, the proposed rules include a maximum calorie count for pizzas of 928

Sofie Hagen is a young Danish comic I admire. I didn’t see her most recent show, Dead Baby Frog, but I saw her win the best newcomer award at Edinburgh in 2015 and I was happy for her. I liked her sweet face and her fury. The audience treated her as a benign oddity. Because Sofie is fat. I say this with no judgment, for I am fat myself, but I am not as upset about it as she is. I make no attempt to spin my fat into a matter for universal sympathy and something to be admired. It is, as the adult self says, what it is. Even