It’s over three years now since a visibly chastened Boris Johnson emerged from his near-fatal brush with Covid to declare that he had seen the light.
He had, he said candidly, been “way overweight” when he got the virus and only now did he understand how vulnerable that had made him; so now he stood before us a changed man. There would be no more scoffing at Jamie Oliver, no more chuntering about nanny statism; instead, he promised not just a ban on junk food advertising or (yet another) national obesity strategy, but what looked positively like a national crusade, led by a prime minister who’d had his own battles with cheese and chorizo and wasn’t going to judge anyone else for raiding the fridge late at night.
