Do begin comfort eating, because the government has announced it is to tackle obesity - a subject poignantly off limits for so long. When John Prescott and Charles Clarke were easing their girths beneath the cabinet table, you see, the merest mention of it would result in the nation pointing in the manner of Homer Simpson, and chuckling, "Look at the fat men telling us what to do!"
The cabinet has shed at least 30 stone of useless weight in the past two years, as the old joke goes, yet as a body politic it has fallen prey to the curse of yo-yo dieting, and simply re-acquired a load of flabby thinking. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, might be a "muscle weighs more than fat" kinda guy, but the sight of him dragging a 13-stone child into TV studios this week was a reminder that inside every esteemed office of state a minister for fat fighters is trying to get out.
Fat Fighters, you may recall, is run by the merciless Little Britain character Marjorie Dawes, and in keeping with the Blairite mania for latching needily on to popular culture creations some years after everyone else found them funny - see the former PM's "am I bovver'd" Comic Relief horror - the Brown administration appears to have been shown some Little Britain sketches and thought: "This is good. Let's make a policy about it."
Marjorie's shtick is to sneer at and belittle the lumpen proletarian members of her weight-loss group, all under the guise of providing support. She ignores her own shortcomings - luminously obvious to us - and dispenses the following sort of advice: "You see your problem is, Tania, you're fat AND old. It gets harder, doesn't it, and there's no man, is there, you're on your own? ... Forty-nine, yeah, so you're on your own, every night crying and eating. Well, at least you've got all of us here at Fat Fighters to make you feel better. Off you pop! Oh, she stinks an' all ..."
I found myself oddly reminded of Marjorie on Wednesday as the government's representative sympathetically encouraged an obese 13-year-old to explain her problems with food on national TV. Cravenly opting against taking on the food industry - which it appears to assume will take voluntary measures to curb its most lucrative excesses, such as junk food advertising before 9pm - the Brown administration is instead trailing proposals that include bribing citizens with vouchers to lose weight, and instigating workplace weigh-ins and group therapy sessions.
I think they call this Inch Loss Island on GMTV. None of it is really a surprise, given that Brown wanted to ennoble that programme's presenter, Fiona Phillips, and make her a junior health minister. But if the government is serious about what we might call the Slimming World Doctrine, let it put its money where its capacious mouth is. Let a pilot scheme be run that does not involve overweight 13-year-olds accompanying the secretary of state on telly. Instead, let the entire cabinet be guinea pigs for its own mooted "healthy living" policy.
Though none of the cabinet is morbidly obese, by the strict definitions in its "Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives" document, many of its members might be judged overweight, having a body mass index greater than 25. And that is before we take into account their lifestyles. We can assume that bar a few exceptions, the cabinet are not paragons of macrobiotic living, and those exceptions will be necessary for the experiment so other ministers have people with whom they can miserably compare themselves.
The cabinet will begin by being weighed and photographed in underwear for one of those cruelly lit "before" photos, which will be placed on a website. There must be video clips, naturally, so perhaps Trinny and Susannah and their satanic 360-degree mirror could be drafted in at this stage. "Come on Des, you've got great boobs, but that neck bulge must be swaddled at all times!" All ministers will submit to a diet and exercise regime, and keep meticulous food diaries. Each week everything they have consumed will be laid out on a trestle table, and Gillian McKeith drafted in to sneer at it. "Oh Jacqui, you disgust me, you really do. How can you be snacking on a kebab at 5pm? Why not try my reasonably priced seed munch?"
After a reasonable trial period - a year, perhaps - they would have their final weigh-in and "after" photo. But here's the key moment. The only perceptible goal in modern TV shows appears to be that participants declare they've been on a "journey", so the cowed and demonised - and probably no thinner - cabinet would be shown this past week's footage by an interviewer. Can you believe that was you, they'd be asked, the sort of people who'd drag a 13-year-old on to TV while you droned on about incentivising them? Do you realise how hideous you once were? Do you promise you'll never go back to your old ways?
With this tough-love approach, the government will come to realise that while giving us their Marjorie Dawes may be quick and feel delicious in the short term, it is far more satisfying to spend longer preparing a strategy via which you can have the junk food industry for breakfast.
