Charles Clarke, the education secretary, has the look of a man who enjoys his food. When he walks into your restaurant, you consider getting in extra kitchen staff. So is he quite the right man to be launching a campaign this week to encourage healthy eating in schools? “Clarke is enormous,” said one recent visitor to his office. “He’s like one of those Weebles, which wobble but can’t fall over.” His advice on healthy eating will be like Gordon Brown telling us all to cheer up, Estelle Morris suggesting that we be a bit more assertive or Iain Duncan Smith handing out advice on the best way to deal with split ends.

The department’s campaign, called Healthy Living Blueprint, will set out a range of ideas to help children eat a more balanced diet at school, to do more exercise and to take more care of their health. So remember, children, when you enjoy a lavish meal at a Pizza Express, don’t do what Clarke once did and order another.

“A healthy body leads to a healthy mind,” says Clarke. “Good health and effective learning go hand in hand.”

Sound advice, minister. Now, would you like fries with that?

Wary Brown declines to stick his neck out for art

There are a few people who would like to see Gordon Brown’s head put on display somewhere, but apparently he isn’t one of them.

The sculptor Sandy Stoddart had been commissioned to produce a bust of Brown for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, but the chancellor — perhaps mindful of the public expenditure — has declined to pose.

It’s probably just as well, because Gordon’s steely gaze would not have been a cheery prospect for visitors to the gallery. “Brown’s likeness is most naturally found when he is not smiling,” explains Stoddart with masterly understatement.

• Oliver Letwin has called on us all to take more risks, and you can’t say the shadow chancellor doesn’t lead by example. Remember the time two years ago when he let an early-morning caller use the lavatory at his London home? The man turned out to be a burglar and Letwin had to give chase down the street in his dressing gown. Was that the sort of risk you had in mind, Oliver?

Dubya in quiet word with Edward the Confessor

After pilgrims pay homage at the Republican convention in New York, here is a little insight into George Bush’s own religious faith. Officials at Westminster Abbey have revealed that the president and his wife prayed at the shrine of Edward the Confessor during a visit to Britain last year. And what was it that moved him about that most pious Anglo-Saxon king? “Well, sir, I don’t really know about that,” says a White House spokesman. “Isn’t it possible he just thought it was a good spot to pray in?”

• oIn a Ted Heath-style grump, John Birt has bitterly criticised the choice of Michael Grade as BBC chairman. He has even written to the prime minister warning that putting Grade in charge was “the worst public appointment” Tony Blair has made, according to the memoirs of Greg Dyke, Birt’s successor as director-general. Birt and Grade worked together at London Weekend Television, but, says Dyke, another LWT alumnus, they have hated each other for 20 years. What fun staff reunions must be.

• Television producer Michael Hurll was once responsible for the Little and Large show, but enjoys a good laugh nonetheless. So he recently decided to pitch an absurd idea to the big television companies, suggesting a Pop Idol-type show called The Asylum Seekers’ Talent Competition: the winners get citizenship, the losers are deported. The idea was flatly rejected by every company, although the BBC was kind enough to explain why: “We have a similar idea we are working on.”

• Student journalist Julia Buckley, editor of the Oxford University magazine Isis, could barely contain herself during a recent interview with a rugged, enigmatic superstar. “He’s a dreamboat,” she gushed, reporting how she found herself giggling and playing with her hair. “He crosses his legs with Sharon Stone-like panache,” she went on breathlessly (yuck!). A colleague even managed a sneak grope, finding the man in question to be “well fit”. Who is this figure that “oozes charisma” and is “compelling in the flesh”? None other than gorgeous, pouting Alastair Campbell.

• Who’d be a politician? You reach high office, you implement vigorous reforms, and — most important — you bestride the globe in the war on terror. And what do you get for your troubles? You are turned into a squeak-when-you-squeeze Tony Blair plastic dog toy, now available on eBay.