Hi guys, said Jamie Oliver. Not many select committee hearings begin in such casual fashion, but Oliver is not your run-of-the-mill witness. For a start, he answered all the health committee’s questions with honesty, frankness and cockney chirpiness. He had also brought a picnic with him.
“I’m a chef, a campaigner, an author and, most importantly today, a dad,” Oliver said, when asked to identify himself at the outset of a hearing into childhood obesity. “Frankly,” he said, “we need to act like a parent.”
Oliver wanted the government’s permission to put Pepsi-Cola, Haribo, Red Bull and Curly-Wurly on the naughty step. These are not the names of his children, although they bear a similar burden (Poppy Honey, Daisy Boo, Petal Blossom and Buddy Bear), but the sweets and fizzy drinks that are swelling our children’s waistlines and their shareholders’ pockets.
He was not after an outright ban on such things — “Cor blimey,” he almost said, “I’d be kicked out of Britain” — but he had what he called a shopping list of simple requests: a sugar tax with the profits to go into the NHS and schools, a ban on junk food advertising around free online games and before 9pm and a simple labelling system to show how much sugar is in sweets and drink. At this, he opened his picnic box and produced an armful of drinks to pass round the room. On each, he had attached a small label with a picture of a teaspoon and how many spoonfuls of sugar they contained. “Hold it up, Helen,” he shouted at Helen Whately, the Conservative MP for Faversham & Mid Kent, who had been given a bottle of Pepsi.
She read that it contained 14 teaspoonfuls of sugar. The press, whose dietary needs are more pressing, were given a bottle of fruit-flavoured water, which contained five spoonfuls. “The industry don’t want you to have that because the impact is visceral,” Oliver said.
Advertisement
Witnesses should use props more often. Perhaps the next time the defence secretary is giving evidence, he could whizz it across the room by drone. Or the permanent secretary at the department for the environment could slip a couple of badgers into his satchel when they are discussing TB.
Oliver was preceded by the chief executive of Public Health England, who was given a barbecuing over his failure to provide the evidence behind his recent advice to the health secretary on sugar consumption. He, fairly enough, did not want to reveal his advice. The committee, even more fairly, couldn’t see why he wouldn’t publish the impartial evidence. “Can’t those pages just be unstapled?” asked Philippa Whitford, an SNP member and former surgeon who finds the can’t-do ways of Whitehall baffling. Apparently not.
Back to the Naked Chef, though, and Oliver was full of common sense. If you give the British public clear information about their choices, generally they make good decisions, he said. Trust the people, there’s something rarely heard in Westminster.
“Nothing in my plan is radical,” Oliver said. “It’s veeeery basic. The French are doing it. They are being brave, why can’t we? We have got to get medieval on this stuff.” A bold challenge, perhaps, on the eve of the 600th anniversary of Agincourt. Time for the prime minister to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood sugar? Cry God for England, Jamie and St Pukka.