Always one step ahead in cultural matters, I was fat years before everyone else. I was fat back in the eighties, when there were no drive-thrus, megadeals or Starbucks’ brownies, and the only way to get fat was to sit absolutely motionless all week and eat pounds and pounds of cheap cheese. I had to work for it. I had to overcome walking to school every day, living in a time before MTV and PlayStations, and doing old-fashioned calorie-burning things such as washing-up. Every aspect of building my belly was hard. You couldn’t get king-size Mars Bars back then — you had to eat two separate ones to get the same effect. No one ever “maxed” their meal — you had to ask for an excessively large portion. Dorothy Perkins — and other high street fashion chains — only stocked up to a size 14. A teenage girl hoping to show off the good work that all the cheese had wrought would have to wear men’s jeans from Burton. You really had to want that extra arse.

Now, of course, it’s easy to be fat. Children spend their lives in the back of a Vauxhall Zafira, there is always something on telly more entertaining than playing football in the drizzle, and they are never more than 200 yards away from a bucket of caramel macchiato.

You probably won’t even notice that you are getting fat — everyone around you has gone up a dress size since 1990, and the size 14 jeans in BeWise can easily and flatteringly accommodate a size 18. And when you do acknowledge that you are fat, the world is happy to accommodate you, and your spare you. Should you wish to, you can get a size 28 mini-skirt in H&M, and then walk down the street with similarly hefty women, all cackling about how great it is to be chunky knit. It’ s the ease and normality of this thigh-expansion that’s worrying the Government. As we all know by now, it’s generally poor people who are getting fat. The middle-class maxim has always been that you should be earning your age in thousands per annum. The modern working-class version of that is that you should be weighing your age in stones; which, I’m proud to say, I had managed by the time I was 11.

But when fat poor people fall ill — or need to be cut out of their narrow-doorwayed houses by fire-crewsmen — it’s the middle classes who have to pay for it. This is why the Government published another report yesterday on just what will stop poor people swelling up like the Giant Turnip. The Treasury adviser, Derek Wanless, suspects that big initiatives to promote healthier lifestyles don’t work — a conclusion he presumably came to after just looking out of the window for two minutes and counting all the arse-cracks he could see hanging out of the back of people’s jeans.

Well, obviously, a few posters suggesting that everyone would feel a lot better if they ate more peas and touched their toes aren’t going to change the habits of a nation. If wall-to-wall rolling news coverage of Kylie Minogue’s buttocks, Posh Spice’s arms and Kate Moss’s legs, all having a fabulous time at premieres, doesn’t spur people to take the Sara Lee gateau out of their face, a couple of posters depicting purple sprouting broccoli as “ your carotene-packed pal!” won’t.

Of course, this doesn’t answer the question of what we’re going to do with all this . . . extra Britain. The idea of a “fat tax” was floated a few months ago, only to be rebuffed by Gordon Brown, who said that it would be penalising the poor. What he meant was that he didn’t want to go down in history as the Labour Chancellor who put a pound on a packet of Penguins — the working classes can get very revolutionary when their snacking instincts are denied.

But if Mr Brown can work around the slight inconvenience of having his head on a spike, I’m sure he’d find the fat tax would work. The only reason anyone does anything these days is either because it costs them money not to or because they are on live television and someone tells them to do it. If there are two frozen pizzas in a shop, and the one covered in curried mince and hot dogs is £1 more expensive than the pepper and tomato one, nine times out of ten, people are going to buy the cheaper one. So long as the fat tax revenues go directly into subsidising veg in a literal “carrot and stick” scenario, then it is surely a more realistic plan than getting Five to televise everyone’s trip around Asda.

Of course, as with tobacco and alcohol, higher taxes will lead to a black-market economy in junk food, supplying cut-price Tunnock’s Teacakes to the desperate and poor. Personally, I rather like the idea of gangsters smuggling 6,000 Wispas, 12 boxes of Kettle Crisps and 50 kilos of Black Jacks into the country, hidden in a consignment of sprouts. I think we need more crimes that sound like they could have been committed by Roald Dahl’s Veruca Salt.

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