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. How dare that callous albino buffoon eat scones when this is happening? And the radio phone-in shows would be full of scone-envy. Some hack would print a menu from the House of Commons tea rooms showing quite clearly the legend ‘scones with jam and cream’. Greedy fat scone-munching scum, while our children are dying.

And so, ineluctably, the taxpayers will fork out for elevenses and high tea. At which point the next very highly paid footballer comes along — Jordan Pickford of Everton, say — to decry what is happening to the nation’s puppies in this Covid-stricken era. They, too, are starving. The Kibble Campaign is very quickly launched — but then dies a rather swift death.