The crusaders running the “war on obesity” are toying with a new weapon: interning children without trial. Eight-year-old Connor McCreaddie weighs 89kg - about 14st. Today his mother and grandmother are due to face a child protection conference in North Tyneside, which will decide whether Connor should be placed on the at-risk register, or even placed in care, for being too fat.

Time was when fat kids only had to fear the school bully. Now they and their parents risk being bullied by a gang of authorities and experts. Complaining that “People pick on us ’cos of my weight”, Connor says he is “sick of the nutters always shouting at us”. To those picking on his family he can now add two specialist obesity nurses, a consultant paediatrician, two social workers and a police officer, who will all be at the conference. Oh, and Sir Trevor McDonald, whose Tonight with . . . ITV programme featured him last night.

It is hard to speculate about the causes of obesity in an individual case (although we might note that while Connor is overweight, he is also reportedly 5ft tall with size eight feet — hardly the average eight-year-old). But we can say that none of these antiobesity interventions has been shown to be effective, from the fat camps to care orders pioneered in America. A “strict regime” of diet and exercise may have helped Connor to lose 9kg in two months. The longer-term prospects of success remain slim. What boys like him could do with is a life, not a “regime”.

Indeed, coercive interventions are worse than useless. They can do real harm to those on the receiving end. Connor’s frightened mum said that the prospect of him being taken into care would “be the death of me”.

That there can even be serious discussion about removing children from loving families reflects some fatheaded prejudices. There is a morbid obsession with overweight kids, marked by overblown warnings about child obesity time bombs and epidemics. And there is a bitter prejudice against working-class parents — those crisp-wielding “f***ing a***holes, tossers, idiots” as St Jamie Oliver branded them last year — while Ken Livingstone, the Miserabilist of London, decreed that mothers passing junk food to hungry schoolchildren should be arrested.

The McCreaddie case smacks of the same contempt. A consultant paediatrician told the Tonight show that the family would “actually love him to death, literally” and that overfeeding him was “a form of child abuse”. (Yeah, obese and abuse almost sound the same!) Imagine how much better off he would be in the love-free environment of the at-risk register or care home . . .

Connor’s mother pleads that she has cut down on takeaways. It would be far healthier for all concerned if we threw out any notion of taking away her son.

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