Donald Macintyre's Sketch: Jamie Oliver's alarming spoonfuls of sugar make clarity go down

This was the select committee hearing as performance art. And not just because of the highly unusual applause from an admittedly sympathetic audience after Jamie Oliver’s evidence. The most shocking moment was when he distributed round the room from a large cardboard box several bottles of soft drinks, each with his own personal stamp-sized sticker saying just how many sugar teaspoonful equivalents it contained: Pepsi 14, Ribena, 13, etc. Even the deceptively colourless bottle of Volvic he deposited on the press table, had five.

This demonstrated exactly the effectiveness of the labelling “clarity” the manufacturers don’t want the consumers to see. But then Oliver is clarity himself, the kind of campaigner who leaves most politicians trailing in his wake. And has been since he was promoting nutritious school dinners when, as he put it, the regulatory regime “was very robust for dog food and not for children’s food.”

A little later he rummaged in the cardboard box again to brandish a can of Red Bull, heavy in both sugar and caffeine, of the sort he said he found all too often in primary children’s lunch boxes. This could easily be bought without restriction by a child of nine. Nor had the teacher who confiscated it any guidelines by which to defend her decision against an angry parent. “We’ve got to get medieval about this” Oliver proclaimed.

He was clever too, praising David Cameron for his seriousness on the “obesity strategy,” while pointedly repeating that he now had to be “brave and bold.” The earmarked sugar tax Oliver wants would raise £1bn for the NHS and nutritional education for primary schools. But it would also be “symbolic of a government that is willing to fight tooth and nail public health and in particular children’s health.” Oliver insisted that he was not being “radical.” But in fact his proposition was fairly fundamental. We had to “work out who’s running the country - businesses that are profiting from our children’s ill health or it us?....I don’t want business being put over child care….Over my dead body.”

“When my kid’s naughty,” he explained, “a bit lairy, he goes on the naughty step. That’s what the tax is, that’s what the clarity is.” On 19 October, however, the man indisputably on Tory committee chair Sarah Wollaston’s “naughty step” was Public Health England boss David Selbie, trying hard to convince her that it was OK not to publish the sugar and obesity evidence it had based its advice to government on. And failing abysmally. To suggest that others shouldn’t see the evidence to contribute to the decision was a “dangerous precedent and a rather patronising one,” she said—quietly and lethally.

After Selbie’s bureaucratic contortions. Jamie Oliver was a big relief. A performance, yes. But in a good way.