If curiosity doesn’t kill the cat, what does?

The first nanny state

The Prime Minister’s strategy on obesity has been labelled a work of the ‘nanny state’ — not least because Boris Johnson himself, during his campaign to become Conservative leader last year, promised to banish ‘the continuing creep of the nanny state’. The term can be traced to the 12 February 1965 edition of The Spectator, under a piece with the byline ‘Quoodle’ — a pseudonym used by the then editor Ian Macleod — about the government’s decision to prohibit cigarette advertising on commercial television. ‘Personally I regard the proof of a causal link between heavy cigarette-smoking and the incidence of lung cancer as overwhelming,’ he wrote. ‘But so is the link between heavy drinking and death on the road. And perhaps between gambling and bankruptcy… This new victory for the nanny state represents the wrong approach.’