The government has serious work to do. As world war looms and the economy dives perilously close to recession, they have announced yet another bold and exciting policy to meet the historical moment: banning chips from school dinners.

Labour are bizarrely obsessed with directly feeding the nation, something that the private sector has done pretty well over the last few thousands of years

We were told yesterday that ‘fried food including chicken nuggets and fish and chips will be banned from being served in schools.’ This will, apparently, ‘reduce obesity’. Pizzas and sausage rolls will also be severely limited, and desserts will need to be composed of at least 50 per cent fruit.

Now I can’t get nostalgic about school dinners. Some of the things that I got served at school put me off entire categories of meals for decades. I didn’t realise that salad could be a tasty treat for a good 20 years after leaving education; the memories of what my school provided under that banner were too pungent. Their ‘salads’ included a substance that purported to be salad cream and which still haunts my nightmares; it had a resistance to pressure that seemed very wrong in a condiment, sitting in a malignant lump on the edge of the plate. Cabbage, I discovered many years later, can be a delightful vegetable when lightly sautéed, crisped-up and caramelised. Whatever the canteen did to ours reduced it to an indigestible, soggy green ball that stayed around the mouth for weeks. Tray bakes are quite the thing nowadays, but the ‘jam pie’ created in my school canteen was a forlorn affair, a thin scrape of red on a dry wooden base – socialism on a plate.

This is why I think keeping very tasty food entirely away from children is a bad idea. Because, as in my own case, it only makes non-regime food seem more attractive on the rebound. Raised as I was on slurry and stodge, which I’m sure was technically very good for me, I almost wept out of pure pleasure at my first trip to Pizza Hut in the mid-80s. I didn’t really taste butter until my twenties; I assumed it must be the same as margarine, so my eventual first encounter left me in ecstasy. Every knob of butter still hits me like an explosion of pleasure, and this had disastrous effects on my post-school waistline. The same happened with milkshakes and fizzy drinks.

Labour are bizarrely obsessed by directly feeding the nation, something that the private sector has done pretty well over the last few thousands of years. It is trialling two pilot schemes for ‘public restaurants’, state-subsidised diners in Dundee and Nottingham. Now, when I was a lad and the Soviet Union was still going strong (or so we thought), we laughed at the idea of their ‘stolovayas’, where grey tea and salty eel were doled out to the workers. When we studied Nineteen Eighty-Four at O-level, with its Minitrue canteen – where the fumes of Victory Gin are almost but not quite enough to mask the ‘sour, metallic smell’ of the tiny meat cubes – how could we have known that 40 years on a Labour government would take this up as a really spiffing idea? Our grandparents shuddered at the memories of the ‘British restaurants’ of the second world war, with their snoek and Woolton pie. Now Labour are bringing them back.

At least some of the Labour front bench have the right kind of faces for slamming down dollops of matter; I can see Yvette Cooper or John Healy, who both have a faint air of the gulag about them, wielding huge steel ladles. The stony face of Bridget Phillipson would make an ideal Mrs Bumble.

And think of how often Keir Starmer boasts proudly about school breakfast clubs, as if it were a great achievement that British parents apparently now lack the wherewithal even to shove a packet of cornflakes in the direction of their offspring. There is – like many of Labour’s wheezes – something both comic and sinister about the enterprise, this odd urge to take control of mealtimes, to nationalise nutrition.

There is also the strange preoccupation of the progressive class with deciding which substances enter children’s bodies; remember, at the same time they’re cracking down on chips, they’re trialling drugs for little boys and girls who don’t conform to sex stereotypes, which will sterilise them for life – just to check if that’s a good or a bad idea.

This is a government that said it was going to ‘tread a little lighter on our lives’. But who also announced yesterday that  they’re going to start posting directly on YouTube to combat ‘misinformation’, with their own channel ‘featuring influencers and everyday people in a bid to better communicate… policies to the public’.

They really do seem to think that if they stuff us with their food and their ‘content’, then we will scurry gratefully to vote for them.

But the chip ban is about the right level for this sorry Labour lot. They seem happiest when tinkering like this, making life just a little less bearable, more irritating by increments. Despite Starmer’s frequent flitting about on the world stage, he is gleeful at the prospect of returning food standards regulations (food again!) back to Brussels.

This is, one suspects, what really fires Labour’s blood. Not any of the great statecraft or grand decision making of politics – but mere pettifogging, ‘button-up-your-overcoat’ trivia. It makes me gag.