When The Times reported on Thursday that Britain is in the “bottom third of European nations” for physical activity levels, I thought it was a very apposite use of the word “bottom”. We are in the “bottom” third: the group of European nations which is made up mostly of bottoms.

Holland, Estonia and Germany, on the other hand, are in the “top” third, and their people consist almost entirely of heads, shoulders and biceps. Croatia, Romania and Finland, at Nos 14, 15 and 16, are in the “middle” third, a little soft around the belly, a bit midriffy, but still just about holding it together.

And then there’s us at No 21, and then Cyprus, Turkey, Sweden, Italy ... the great arse nations. The countries whose inhabitants never exercise at all and are thus, for the most part, nothing more than a giant pair of buttocks with a pair of cheap trainers and a hat.

And so the new Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, has decided to get us all exercising. At this news we all yawn, stretch, groan and file it away with the “five portions” farrago under futile government initiatives designed to deflect attention from inadequate education, craven indulgence of the giant food conglomerates that have been poisoning us for years, and the fact that the only strategy they’ve come up with to keep disaffected schoolchildren out of trouble is to fill their mouths so full of Monster Munch and Coke they won’t have anywhere to put the crack pipe, and will be too obese for underage sex.

But Mr Burnham, ahead of the 2012 Olympics, has no plans to get us running and jumping and throwing things in the traditional sense. Nor are there plans to get us playing a bit of cricket. As for tennis, we’re leaving that to Andy Murray. What Andy Burnham wants us to do is dance. And so he has appointed Arlene Phillips, the recently rejected Strictly Come Dancing judge as his dance czar, along with the failed contestant Lisa Snowdon, to organise mass, indiscriminate dancing.

Dance, the last cultural resort of the bona fide imbecile. The party pastime of people who are too stupid to talk. The perverse repetitive jiggling, mostly when intoxicated, of proper, old-fashioned idiots, who consider it an entertainment to resign their decisions about bodily movement to the group, subsume their individual identities to the horde, and simply spasm to the throb, throb, throb of the pill-befuddled loser at the front with the very loud gramophone.

Never, as a younger man, did I feel more alone than sitting in a nightclub, on my own at a table, keeping watch over the drinks and phones and bags and coats, while my friends went to twitch involuntarily in response to a noise coming out of boxes mounted on the wall. I felt like the only dissenter at a Nuremberg rally, the only one stepping back and saying, “wait, hang on, this is wrong”. It would be just as bad at weddings, birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Worse, even, because you are usually insulting someone by declining. I am revolted by obesity, God knows. But I am revolted even more by dancing.

“We have to set up centres,” Ms Phillips gushed on Thursday, like some warzone paramedic risking her life to organise a network of field hospitals for napalmed children. “We have to find places where people can just walk to get where they can dance. We have to make it part of people’s daily lives.”

What a horrific thought. It puts one immediately in mind of the St Vitus’ dance epidemic that began in Germany in 1347 and soon spread across medieval Europe: an unexplained plague of hysterical dancing, night and day, passed on, apparently, by the mere witnessing of the event. It was the 14th-century equivalent of those terrifying dance happenings in stations and airports where thousands of brain-dead freaks with iPods suddenly start dancing silently to the same song. In the 14th century such people were assumed to have been possessed by the Devil. And even today I think that is a pretty fair diagnosis. When I see a kid even tapping his foot to an MP3 tune on the bus my thoughts turn immediately to the ducking stool.

Sure, we must tackle the obesity crisis, the fecklessness disease, the podginess pandemic, the megabloat timebomb, call it what you will. But please God don’t let’s leave it to a couple of foot-tapping old dears no longer required by a reality dance show. What a hellish chain of thought must have gone on in the health office: “What shall we do with Arlene and Lisa now that junk television doesn’t want them any more? Ooh, I know, bring them to the heart of government. That’ll get the moronic, telly-doped, witless, couch potato peasantry to sit up and take notice.”

If they can sit up. Probably they’ll just have their council-appointed £100,000-a-year specialist obesity carer raise one of their eyebrows for them, fart, and go back to sleep.

Arlene Phillips, for heaven’s sake. I mean, she looks good for 106, I’ll grant you, but she has used Botox, hankers publicly after a gastric band and admits: “I know I will have a facelift eventually.” What sense, what depth, what humanity. From the waist up she’ll be mostly polythene.

Is that what Mr Burnham secretly wants us to do: liposuck, Botox and tummy tuck our way to a higher spot on the list? Will Arlene be put in charge of that, too? Will she combine her dance czar duties with being Mr Burnham’s Cosmetic Surgery Kommandant? His Plastic Pope?

Perhaps it would be best to give her a peerage, like Alan Sugar, so she can get in there and get the Lords hopping about to some preposterous tweenybop girl band caterwauling. Give her an office, stick “Botox’n’Groovin’ Minister” on the door, and wait for the votes to roll in. Then maybe ennoble that Liverpudlian builder who won the first series of Big Brother, Craig I think his name was, and make him housing czar. And that hairy Welsh woman who failed to win the singing show would make an ideal prime minister — she is the spit and image of Gordon Brown and, like him, knows just how to fall to bits when your one big chance finally comes.

Offering a model for her mass danceathons, Ms Phillips says: “In China, where in open spaces people join in and take t’ai chi with the masses, it’s there, it’s available.”

Great idea, Arlene, old girl. Let’s take our lead from an overpopulated dictatorship where people gather in public to do exactly as they are told, partly because there is nothing else to do, and partly because if they don’t they’ll be shot. George Orwell said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” But only because he did not dare entertain the nightmare of “a boot dancing to some cool tunes in public”.

I’m no fan of the fat, but I will defend to the death (or until one of them sits on me) their right to be free. I will not kowtow to the communism of dance.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die