Boris Johnson knows a ban on junk food ads won’t tackle obesity – it’s gesture politics

The prime minister is well aware that he cannot legislate for healthy eating, writes John Rentoul, so what is he up to?

Boris Johnson has said he has managed to lose weight in recent weeks (Getty)

Boris Johnson the opinionated wit used to get an easy fee out of a column railing against the nanny state bossing us about, telling us what we can and cannot eat, especially if it was nearly August and there was a sudden news vacuum.

His conversion to the prime minister who wants to ban junk food ads before 9pm is one of several unexpected news stories that have marked his first year in office. “I’m not normally a believer in nannying,” he said today.

As a policy designed to reduce obesity, a ban on ads before the watershed has little to recommend it. As Johnson the columnist would have pointed out, there are a lot of calories in caviar and a lot of the language of junk food is pure snobbery. Foods that are high in sugar, salt or fat, which is how “junk” is defined by the Food Standards Agency, can be perfectly healthy as part of a balanced diet.

Next, anyone who talks about “ads before 9pm” knows nothing about modern advertising or modern children. What is this “live television”?

Besides, average calorie consumption has fallen in the UK in recent decades, while the average body weight has increased, so the link between the two is not simple. The idea that the average adult has put on 8kg since 1980 because they have seen pre-watershed adverts for crisps or a “three for the price of two” offer in a supermarket does not seem evidence-based.

That said, crude nanny-state interventions can have some effect. George Osborne’s sugar tax on soft drinks, for example, never actually took effect because all the makers of canned and cartoned drinks cut the sugar content so they wouldn’t have to pay. That may have done the nation’s teeth some good, and it is unlikely to have increased obesity, so if the test of government action is that it should do no harm, it has been met in this case.

Johnson the prime minister knows that he cannot legislate for healthy eating, of course, so what is he up to? The answer, I think, is empathy. Worrying about being a bit heavier than he ought to be is something he shares with a lot of people. And opinion polls suggest that gesture-measures, such as banning “junk food” ads or “bogof” (buy one get one free) supermarket offers, are popular.

That means, cynically, Johnson gets to identify with a lot of voters with no downside except that the food companies will whinge about having to put their prices up.

Everyone knows that obesity is more complicated than that, but to have a jogging, tennis-playing (and formerly bicycling) prime minister who likes cheese doing the nanny-stating puts him on the side of the people.

It helps Johnson that he has had the coronavirus. Imagine how different all this week’s retrospectives about his first year in office would have been if he hadn’t. He would have been damned even more for his handling of the crisis, as an out-of-touch politician who had no idea of the privations he was imposing on the population.

Instead, obese enough to be particularly at risk, he could have died. The sympathy may have partly worn off, but the empathy remains. He is one of us. This battle against obesity is not something that a thin leader wants to fight on behalf of the nation.

Banning adverts and supermarket promotions won’t make any practical difference, but they will show that “Johnson the prime minister” – a changed man from “Johnson the columnist” – is on our side.