It was all meant to be so different, wasn’t it? All of the nannying, the illiberal bans and preaching, the holier-than-thou attitude….all due to be swept away when McDoom becomes the longest ever serving Prime Minister never to have won a General Election. After next May, all was to be well. Bloggers like Devil’s Kitchen and A Very British Dude were wrong to be scaremongering about alleged patriarchal attitudes of some of the incoming Government.

Well, this was Mike Penning, Shadow Health Minister, during a debate on health “inequalities” last week:

“I am becoming increasingly convinced that alcohol products should provide an indication of calorie content, because the simple fact is that if any of us or our partners were to go to any weight-reducing organisation, whether it is run by a local authority or is one of the national programmes, it would tell us that if we consume more than an average amount of alcohol, our weight will be difficult to control. I am a perfect example of that. Since I have given up drinking pints of one particular brand of alcohol – I will have to say that it is Guinness – I have lost in excess of two stone in six months. That was done on the advice of my cardiologist. Do I miss that particular form of alcohol enormously? To be truthful, yes. However, has giving it up helped me enormously? Yes, it has – it has cost me a few more pounds in suits, but I think it was worth while.”

So, he is unable to make a simple lifestyle choice without the assistance of a cardiologist? Sure, if you stop drinking a fattening drink then you are likely to lose weight – that’s logical and shouldn’t need a heart surgeon to wheel out his Diploma in Stating The Bleedin’ Obvious to confirm what any fule kno. Ditto, taking exercise helps. TheEye lost 3 stone after taking up rock-climbing* for example.

What’s really concerning is that he thinks we actually need a little label by law on our drinks reading “Fattening Drinks Make You Fat“.

Actually he may have a point. TheEye got confused last Friday between the number of calories and the number of alcoholic units you are supposed to have per day. It wasn’t the 6 calorie single slice of bread for lunch which was the problem so much as the 3,261 units of wine that night.

* This is a complete lie.