Former libertarian and epic eater Boris issues nanny state orders on what to eat

The government will soon unveil a comprehensive anti-obesity strategy which will likely feature a television watershed on the advertisement of unhealthy products, restrictions on the promotion and placement of junk food in stores, and a requirement for restaurants to provide calorie labels for their products. The announcement could be forthcoming as soon as Monday.

It will mark one of the largest single increases in anti-fat regulation in history, comparable only to George Osborne’s sugar tax. The pushback has been severe: commercial broadcasters and advertisers have warned of the financial costs, and libertarian commentators such as Christopher Snowdon are loudly decrying “purse-lipped, micro-managing, finger-wagging, lemon-sucking, nanny-knows-best, censorious, anti-business, killjoy policies”.

The Prime Minister has himself historically taken a libertarian position on health regulation, at least rhetorically, however. He famously told a fringe event at the 2006 Conservative Party conference that if he was in charge, he would “get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like”, adding that parents should be allowed to push pie through the railings of their children’s schools. In last year’s leadership contest, he told a hustings that he would end the “continuing creep of the nanny state.”

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to say that Johnson has experienced a Damascene conversion. In office he has often indulged in the very nanny-state policies he has derided in the past. One of his first acts as Mayor of London was to ban the drinking of alcohol on public transport. Towards the end of his mayoralty, to the chagrin of civil servants, he imposed a 10p sugar tax on soft drinks at a cafe inside City Hall.

Johnson now sees a new urgency in the obesity issue. He is said to have been struck by the effect of his weight on the severity of his bout of coronavirus. Regardless of whether he had an underlying condition, his obesity and age placed him in one of the highest risk categories for hospitalisation. The ultimate consequence was his admission to intensive care, where he came close to being placed on a mechanical ventilator.

One medical source described his predicament bluntly to The Guardian: “There is a very low threshold for people of his profile (over 50, fat). If they don’t get a tube early it makes it much harder to do later on, if he deteriorates further.”

Three months removed from that experience, he has adopted almost the entirety of David Cameron’s plans for restricting unhealthy food marketing and advertising, which Theresa May ditched when he left office. They will, Johnson hopes, not just reduce obesity as risk enhancer for coronavirus before a potential second spike of infections, but also alleviate the burden on the NHS in the long term.

Coronavirus has exposed just how far the Prime Minister’s interventionism can reach. Thomas Wright, an American foreign policy commentator, notes in The Atlantic: “Johnson and his cabinet now… welcome a larger role for government intervention in the economy… with a greater focus on the resilience of open societies and a recognition that the global economy must change how it dispenses wealth.”

That shift is quickly manifesting itself across Whitehall, from a security-first approach to foreign policy to a health-first approach to regulations.

Johnson knows how to appeal to libertarians at party conferences, but he is both comfortable with and practised in the implementation of “nanny state” policies. His approach to governing has been and remains fundamentally practical; he implements whatever policy works politically in a particular period of time – the ideological underpinning comes second.

We should expect more regulatory announcements on the health front, especially if Johnson succeeds in his personal battle against obesity. No promises there, though.