Ask not what the NHS can do for you, but what you can do for the NHS. This appears to be the closest thing our hollow PM, Keir Starmer, has to an ideology, following yet another miserable nanny-state announcement.

As of next October, ‘junk food’ advertising on TV will be banned before the watershed, while its online equivalent will be banned entirely. The alleged aim is to curb childhood obesity, but it is part and parcel of Starmer’s broader agenda to protect the NHS from the public.

This isn’t an original idea of Starmer’s. It’s not clear he’s capable of those. In fact, the ad ban has been knocking around the quangos and activist groups for years. Both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak signed up to it, but delayed its implementation – a reminder that whoever you vote for, the public-health creeps always get in.

Still, it’s fair to say that Labour is doing what it is told by the nanny-state blob with a zeal the Tories lacked.

Starmer is going to finish what Sunak started and pass the ‘generational’ ban on smoking. But even this policy – a phased-in, total prohibition of tobacco – isn’t illiberal enough for him, it seems. Hence his recently announced crackdown on smoking in… smoking areas. Which as we all know are places where non-smokers and small children notoriously tend to gather.