Who would have thought a Prime Minister that once railed against the ‘continuing creep of the nanny state’ would be the one to launch a war on fat? Boris Johnson spent much of his journalistic life before No. 10 criticising the paternalistic instincts of policymakers. Yet now he is promising new laws to help ‘reduce the temptations that lure us away from doing the right thing’. Here are six examples of Johnson’s libertarian rebukes:
1. It’s your own fault you’re fat
On the issue of obesity that has prompted his Damascene conversion, Johnson authored a Telegraph column in 2004 entitled ‘Face it: it’s all your own fat fault’ in which he argued that obesity was a choice and that ‘the more the state tries to take responsibility for the problem, the less soluble the problem will become’. Words for him to live by in 2020 perhaps.
2. Getting rid of Jamie Oliver
Johnson reiterated his defence of the dumpy in 2006 when he criticised Jamie Oliver’s attempts to make school meals more nutritious.
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