The morality of free school meals

The main problem with the government giving in over free school meals during the holidays — other than that it is immoral and unconservative, neither of which have been bars to Conservative policy-making in the past — is that it is a hostage to fortune. What if, next week, another highly paid professional footballer — Tottenham’s Harry Winks, for example, or Liverpool’s Joe Gomez — decides that the nation’s children should also be given by the taxpayer elevenses and high tea?

Such a campaign would generate enormous traction, especially among the affluent. Newspapers would feel unable to resist. Come on, Prime Minister, how can you deny a starving child his right to a scone with some cream and strawberries? And someone would dig up a photo of Boris eating a scone. A scone which any decent person must agree would be better off in the gut of a child, preferably a Liverpudlian child with grime on its face, ribcage showing, but still possessed of a hilariously cheeky wit.