Is there anything Sir Keir could learn from the Japanese? They certainly have a better diet. For one thing, it is easy to get hold of a wide range of fresh fish, whereas in UK supermarkets much of our fish is either frozen, breadcrumbed or gives off that tell-tale fishy smell that means it’s already going bad. Add to that tofu, fresh and pickled veg, miso soup and nattō — sticky fermented soybeans — and you have the basis of a very wholesome diet. What’s more, in Japanese cuisine there is an emphasis on high-quality ingredients, simply prepared, with comparatively little in the way of complex sauces liable to introduce large amounts of fat, sugar or salt into a meal. Japanese children learn about nutrition in depth at school, and lunches there are prepared with strict nutritional guidelines in mind. Youngsters are also taught to stop eating when they feel 80% full, on the basis that by that point they have eaten all they need and the brain just needs a little time to register the fact.

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Still, there is more to the story than diet and nutrition. Successive governments stretching back to the late 19th century have had a hand in crafting Japanese attitudes towards physical health — and not always out of straightforward concern for people’s wellbeing. Some of modern Japan’s earliest nutritionists worked for the armed forces, trying to build the bodies of their soldiers in the 1860s and 1870s. One of the reasons why Japan dropped its Buddhist prohibition on meat-eating — ushering in a first generation of “stew-restaurants” — was the hope that beef-eating in particular would help soldiers to heal faster from their injuries. Everyone from the Emperor downwards soon began eating beef for its promised health benefits.

Nineteenth-century doctors in Japan took a great interest, too, in the health of pregnant women. Healthy women and healthy babies were thought to be essential to the building of a robust workforce. Much was made of how workers in Western countries were often taller and stronger, placing Japan at a competitive disadvantage in everything from industry to future combat. In short, the thought emerged very early in the life of modern Japan that a person’s health is a public good.

This was part of a bigger picture in which the job of the state was not so much to fulfil the wishes of the population as to manage it according to what a small ruling elite regarded as being in the country’s best interests. Japan’s civil servants regarded themselves as “shepherds of the people”: they would research the sorts of Western social problems to which a modernising Japan was liable to fall victim, come up with solutions and then implement them with the help of doctors, midwives and school teachers. Compared to countries such as the UK, mass party politics and the idea of bottom-up political change never really took hold in pre-war Japan. People were taught that the state, as the expression of the Emperor’s will (in reality, the will of a tiny ruling clique), knew best. This idea survived into the postwar period, when after a brief flirtation with Left-wing politics an “iron triangle” of Right-leaning politicians, businesses and the civil service helped to manage the country’s remarkable economic recovery.

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The result of all this has been that people in Japan accept a degree of paternalism and official cajolery from their leaders that would feel culturally alien in the UK. Public trust is sometimes undermined, when politicians are revealed to be on the take or when the state response to disasters — notably the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of March 2011 — is exposed as inadequate. But the Japanese state has proven resilient over the years, notably in responding to public disquiet about environmental pollution in the Sixties and Seventies by advising big businesses to salvage their reputations and protect themselves against legal action by agreeing to stringent environmental and health and safety legislation. This included workplace health checks like the ones that Labour are considering for the UK: these have been happening in Japan for more than 50 years.

The trend, over time, has been towards expanding the scope of these checks. What started, in 1972, as a basic physical exam alongside blood and urine tests steadily expanded to include tests for cholesterol and blood sugar levels and even electrocardiograms. Employers are under a legal obligation to follow up with their employees, meaning that your boss may insist on you taking measures to lose weight. For the past decade, psychological stress has been tested too, partly in response to high-profile lawsuits launched by families of workers who died from overwork, including by suicide.

It may be that in the UK, too, once people have accepted the idea of health checks in the workplace then the scope of those checks will steadily grow. Whether or not we will become comfortable with our employers taking a close interest in our health, however, remains to be seen. During the mindfulness boom of the 2010s, suspicions were raised that companies encouraging their employees to meditate might have their eye more on improving workers’ productivity than their wellbeing. Besides, in Japan it has long been accepted — if not necessarily welcomed by all — that employers and even complete strangers may comment on your physical health. It was part of a culture of corporate paternalism that saw employers regularly attending their employees’ weddings and even giving speeches at them. At the same time, what might be considered fat-shaming or plain old rudeness in the UK happens quite frequently in Japan: people report having comments made about their size in public, even receiving gentle prods in the stomach as someone marvels at their excess flesh.

Some say that we can’t tackle obesity, Japan-style, because we would first need to reimagine our society, accepting a deeper level of involvement by the state, our employers and even complete strangers in our physical health. But perhaps that puts things the wrong way around. It may be instead that by adopting measures of the kind that Labour is proposing, the idea takes root that physical health is a communal rather than just a personal good, not least because it eases pressure on the NHS. Obesity is less obviously harmful to others in the way that smoking and drink-driving are: two practices that were reversed in part by establishing them as socially taboo. But it is not impossible to imagine the case being successfully made.

Critics of Japanese conformity might say that this isn’t the sort of society we want to become; that “community” is all very nice until you bump up against ideas that you find unacceptable, but which other people seek to impose on you. And yet for those who think that post-Covid Britain is losing its sense of community and basic interpersonal trust, workplace health checks — conducted with compassion and with real interest in people’s lives and wellbeing — might, in time, become part of our road to recovery.

There was no such plot; in reality, British civil servants had mis-read the EU document in question. But that didn’t matter. It enabled Johnson to stand up for freedom of choice — consumer choice — and to make that unbridled consumer choice look English, as opposed to silly bureaucratic rules, which came to look European, stuffy, and uptight. He probably also knew that prawn cocktail crisps were a slap in the face for the metropolitan elite who would — and did, reliably — sneer at prawn cocktails, let alone their reincarnation as a snack food.

By championing them, and looking very like a man who enjoyed them, Boris Johnson made himself a member of a class — indeed, he almost created the class he came to exemplify. The class in question has acquired an abusive name, and it’s not coincidental that it is the name of a food.

For his foes, Boris Johnson is a gammon, and gammon is a contentious word for the visible class of people characterised not only by being members of the white Anglo-Saxon race, but also by their entitlement, sentimental self-pity, xenophobia, English (not British) patriotism, and, above all, by their constant tendency to fly into a rage that leaves them scarlet in the face. Johnson, apoplectic at the thought of losing prawn crisps, made himself gammon-in-chief. Gammon is the antithesis of a health food, strong in flavour and salt and fat. Gammon is also, relatively, a cheap food. It’s the kind of food that used to leaven a diet mostly composed of tasteless carbohydrates like potato or boiled grains.

Prawn cocktail crisps, unlike gammon, are an ersatz imitation of something you might order in a restaurant. Admittedly, public schoolboys have always eaten more than their fair share of junk food, and there may actually be a natural bond between the working classes and the upper classes: both dislike the interfering, puritanical middle-class who are always trying to curtail other people’s pleasures “for their own good”.

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Johnson’s prawn cocktail crisps campaign was also the beginning of the campaign of restorative nostalgia that has brought him to Downing Street. In her new book, Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum pinpoints restorative nostalgia as central to the appeal of the new nationalist right in Poland, Spain and Hungary, and also in the United Kingdom. Drawing on the work of Svetlana Boym, Appelbaum explains that restorative nostalgics do not want to contemplate or learn from the past; they want “the cartoon version of history, and they want to live in it, right now”.

Their narrative goes like this: the nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. Someone — the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU — has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. The essential identity that it once had has been taken away. This, this election, this referendum, is the last chance to save the country — therefore, it doesn’t matter what lies are told. “The European Union wants to kill our cuppa,” said one Facebook advert during the referendum campaign, in keeping with Johnson’s own hit parade of “Threat to British pink sausages” or “EC cheese row takes the biscuit.” It is essential to restorative nostalgia that it should be constantly enraged by a non-existent threat to a fictional national distinctiveness.

Yet this meticulously created identity has been brought to the brink of collapse by Johnson’s view of food in the light of his new obesity strategy, a strategy that appears to include banning junk-food advertising before 9pm, adding calorie counts to menus, and ensuring easier and greater access to NHS weight-loss programmes. His sudden zeal for weight loss is widely portrayed by his erstwhile supporters not as a rational political choice, but as an emotional response born of fear, even panic; in short, his experience as a Covid-19 victim.

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This new war is understood as a sign of weakness: “the weight thing has really spooked him,” said a friend. There’s something in this — it is the kind of jumping to conclusions on insufficient data that has characterised the government’s response to the pandemic, since the link between severe Covid-19 requiring hospitalisation and obesity is more a hypothesis than a proven truth, a point Dominic Lawson makes in The Sunday Times. However, like others, he directs most of his criticism at Johnson for his U-turn on government advice, aligning the new campaign with previous Labour governments. Gordon Brown, he recalls, tried to ban Bogofs (“Buy One, Get One Free”) in 2008, but “it didn’t happen then and it won’t now”. Lawson also points out that Johnson once scoffed at what he saw as the “nanny state”, ridiculing veganism as a crime against cheese-lovers and promising that Brexit would not interrupt supply lines of Mars Bars and crisps.

Johnson was also volubly sceptical about David Cameron’s anti-obesity campaign. The Daily Mail concurred: “Boris is becoming the new Ed Miliband.” (Much more to the taste of the Mail is “McDonald’s for breakfast… and Nando’s for dinner!: Diners celebrate Rishi’s Eat Out To Help Out.) In 2006 Johnson told the Conservative Party Conference: “If I was in charge, I would get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like.” Backing “pie-pushing mums”, he told the conference that there was “too much pressure” on children to eat healthily: “I say let people eat what they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through railings?”

From early in his political career, Johnson set out his stall as a man who loves food but doesn’t care what it is. In 2008, he revealed to the Observer that his favourite breakfast was cold spaghetti or leftover birthday cake, though he would make do with a slice of toast and marmalade if necessary. Ingenuously, he said: “I don’t snack apart from a few chocolate croissants mid-morning to keep the wolf from the door.” He must have known that these were fire-eating words. However, and disarmingly, he may have meant them; he went on to say: “I think all food is delicious. I just can’t understand why people go on and on about it, especially restaurant critics. I mean, food is good, isn’t it?” Just what his followers want to hear.

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There is something very strange about this account — its complete indifference to choice or quality or even thought. It’s as if eating pleasure depends on never discriminating, as if the only good eating is led entirely by appetite. Is this even remotely plausible? Or is it an uncomfortable image of the people that Johnson believes are hanging on his words? It is commonplace for the ruling class to see the people below them as undiscriminating bellies or mouths, gobbling down whatever rubbish is put in front of them by manufacturers.

Perhaps Johnson himself no longer knows — if he ever did — whether he really likes prawn cocktail crisps or whether it’s what he expects his popular audience to like. He liked what they represent: the idea of eating at random, eating without rules, without an inner censorious voice. And yet he is now in danger of becoming that censor.

Perhaps Johnson thinks he can now rein in that unbridled eating — his own, or that of other prawn cocktail crisp fanciers — by pointing out what everyone has known from the beginning, that this kind of eating is digging your grave with your teeth.

Then, a few days later, came a scare about children aged 10 consuming the recommended daily sugar allowance for 18-year-olds, based on a Public Health England report. PHE’s chief nutritionist suggested that there “may be a case” for a tax on all sugary goods (there’s already one on soft drinks) if recent progress in reducing sugar loads stalls. And the health secretary, Matt Hancock, is planning to target social media adverts at smokers, drinkers and the obese in an attempt to improve their health.

Sometimes a nudge in the right direction helps. The collapse in smoking levels in recent years is a reminder of that. Smoking kills an awful lot of people, probably about half of all those who do it long-term; all but the most pure-bred libertarians would agree that government action to reduce it has been a positive thing.

Smoking, though, is a special case. There’s nothing else that a fraction of the population uses lots, most people use not at all, and which is unambiguously poisonous. In the years after Richard Doll et al showed that smoking caused lung cancer, epidemiologists were hopeful that there’d be lots of similar things: that they’d be able to show, say, that people who ate pomegranate all died of pleurisy, or drinking tea prevented gout, or something.

But it’s messier than that. Research into nutrition is really, really hard – you can’t reasonably do a randomised controlled trial on broccoli, and make 5,000 people go on a broccoli-free diet for 20 years and another 5,000 eat broccoli every day. If something were as bad for us as smoking, then you’d be able to see the effects with cruder, more observational research. But there isn’t, really. There’s a semi-jokey piece of dietary advice from the writer Michael Pollan from a few years ago: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Despite all the claims about superfoods and so on, and despite many decades of research into the impacts of food on our health, that remains about as precise as scientifically well-supported dietary advice can get.

But wait! Weren’t we just talking about how bacon causes cancer? Well: yes. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a subset of the World Health Organisation, issued a report in 2015 declaring that processed meats including bacon and sausages are carcinogenic. It was a careful assessment of years of prior research, and I’m sure it’s as good as it can be.

That said, there’s carcinogenic and carcinogenic. Smoking all your life raises your risk of lung cancer from about a one-in-1,000 chance of diagnosis in any given year to about a one-in-75 chance, according to this study; as best I can work out, your lifetime lung cancer risk goes up from about 0.2% to about 10%. (It’s kind of unclear because it all depends on how much you smoke and for how long.)

For comparison, if you eat two sausages or two rashers of bacon every day for your entire life, your risk of colorectal cancer goes up, roughly speaking, from about a one-in-1,500 chance per year to about a one-in-1,400, or about 5% in your lifetime to 6% in your lifetime.

To put it another way, if your anti-smoking measures stopped 10 people smoking, you’d probably prevent one case of lung cancer. But you’d have to stop 100 people eating bacon to prevent one case of colorectal cancer. That’s before you think of all the other health effects of smoking (various other cancers, vascular damage, heart disease), and the fact that lung cancer is more deadly than colorectal cancer is.

Sugar is more complicated: people who consume lots of sugar seem to be at greater risk of diabetes, over and above the risk caused by eating too many calories and becoming obese, which sugar, a very energy-intensive foodstuff, obviously contributes to.

But I can’t get a good sense of the scale of the risk; the meta-analysis I linked to earlier seemed to think that about 8,000 cases of type 2 diabetes in Britain per year could be attributed to sugary drinks, which sounds bad, but there are about 230,000 cases a year in total so it’s not a huge proportion. That is, however, only a small part of the overall problem; sugar also contributes to the obesity crisis, which is at the root of a much larger proportion of our health problems. A fifth of 10- to 11-year-olds are classified as obese, a direct result of poor, sugar-heavy diet.

So should we let government step in? My instinct is that a tax on processed meats for health reasons would be overkill – although there might be good environmental and animal-welfare reasons – while I’d be happy to take PHE’s lead on a sugar tax, because of the impact on obesity more than for its own sake.

The most important thing, though, is to express these risks realistically. The science of all this stuff is, as I have said, messy. In the case of processed meat, the cancer risk is relatively small. But the risks are constantly being compared with those of tobacco, which are literally of a different order of magnitude.

This stuff matters. Last week, another study was published about public perceptions of vaping. Vaping is hugely less damaging for you than smoking; it’s probably not harmless, but so far the evidence suggests that the risk is near-negligible compared to tobacco. But the study finds that nearly half of people think that vaping is about as dangerous as smoking.

That’s a direct result of scaremongering, by the media, but also by health campaigners and others who go around hyping every tiny study that finds that vape smoke has some irritant effect on lung cells in petri dishes or whatever, without putting in the context. It will cost lives, because people who might otherwise have switched from fags to e-cigs now will not, and a large number of those people will, therefore, die.

I’m not saying that scaremongering about bacon is as bad. But we do need to recognise that “bad for you” is not a binary condition, and not all carcinogens are born equal. If we rampage around insisting the government tax everything that might possibly give us cancer if we eat too much of it for 40 years, then the really important stuff – the message on smoking, obesity, drinking to excess – is going to get lost in the noise.