Dawn Primarolo. Come on then, if you think you're hard enough …
Our new Wanker of the Week is M.P. for Bristol South and government Minister for Public Health Dawn Primarolo. To explain why, read the words of author and commentator John Mortimer, writing on an Australian news site …
"Leave working tipplers alone
The true sickness of our times is not that we eat too much, smoke cigarettes or knock off a bottle of wine in an evening. It is the ever-growing tendency of medical boards, government officials, politicians and other groups who seem to have nothing better to do than tell us how to lead our lives.
It is as if we are a nation of miscreant mortals who have to be constantly lectured on how to behave.
We have now been told by the Liverpool's Centre for Public Health that the middle classes consume too much wine in their homes. At dining tables in leafy towns and affluent suburbs, too many hard-working professionals are enjoying "hazardous" if not "harmful" amounts of alcohol night after night.
British Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo seized on these findings as another chance to boss us all about. "Most of these are not young people. They are 'everyday' drinkers who have drunk too much for too long," she warns darkly. "This has to stop."
It was in the summer that the Government first suggested it was planning to do something about middle-class drinkers who enjoy a bottle of wine at home in the evening. Now action seems even more likely. What can we expect? An army of local council officials with breathalysers and clipboards knocking on our doors as soon as the sun passes the yardarm, and then returning to see if we are splashing too much cognac about after supper? Perhaps they will kill two birds with one stone, and take advantage of us in our Falstaffian merriment to snoop round our houses. They wouldn't approve of us smoking in our homes, either. Any of us who are caught might be banished from our own drawing rooms into the garden.
The absurdity of a government that allows thousands to become infected and die from superbugs in filthy hospitals, and then worries about how much wine we drink at supper in our homes, should be obvious.
Perhaps the situation needs clarifying. Yes, drinking is a possible danger to your health. But then so is rock climbing, sailing, deep-sea diving, parachuting and motor racing. Are all these activities to be forbidden by law because they are possibly dangerous?
Drinking is legal and the Government must realise that you are entitled to pursue any activity that you enjoy, even if it is at some risk. Nothing seems able to persuade our public officials of the true limits of government. Governments are there to regulate the economy, provide public services and make sure that the drains are working.
But we are run by a bunch of snivelling puritans in a government that has made a speciality of poking its nose into every corner of our lives and trampling all over our civil liberties.
In my view, many of them would benefit from a drink or two.
It is true that alcohol turns many of us into crashing bores. But a politician who enjoys his drink is likely to be far more fun and relaxed about life. George Brown, Harold Wilson's permanently drunk foreign secretary, may have overdone it, but at least he left us with the story - almost certainly apocryphal - of the evening reception at which he approached a figure in a purple dress for a dance.
"There are three reasons why I will not dance with you," came the reply. "One, you are very drunk. Two, they are playing my national anthem. And three, I am the Archbishop of Lima."
But it is not only alcohol that they want to stop us drinking at home. Fresh milk is also out. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs this week said we should be swapping revolting UHT milk for fresh pints - it would save on refrigeration and cut down on carbon emissions. So when the officials come round as we are passing around the peanuts with our pre-dinner drinks, they will want to poke about in our fridge in the national interest.
What else they find will, of course, become the subject of vital inquiry. Eggs, streaky bacon and sausages are serious causes of obesity, which might jeopardise our chances of being treated on the National Health Service. Is there any reason why being fat should be regarded as some sort of sin? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar had, it seems to me, an extremely sensible view: "Let me have men about me that are fat: Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o'nights; Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." Winston Churchill, who brought us through the war, was fat. Fat Falstaff is one of Shakespeare's most memorable and likeable characters."
John Mortimer's views echo exactly our own, expressed a few days ago - except he has put it rather more eloquently.
But the thing that sticks in my craw is Dawn Primarolo's statement: "They are 'everyday' drinkers who have drunk too much for too long. This has to stop."
Well, Dawn, that sounds very much like a threat to me. Just who the hell do you think you are, speaking of your electorate as though they are so many errant schoolboys?
We'll end by quoting, for the second time this week, the words of Alex Williams: "It would be refreshing if these scientific puritans would finally realise that the NHS does not exist for their own intellectual titillation, but to serve its customers - the British people. We are not there to make its life easier, but vice versa."
And Dawn, for believing that you are so superior to the people you are supposed to serve that you can express yourself about them in such threatening and dismissive terms, you are our Wanker of the Week. Not so big and clever now, eh?
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