PM’s not leading the weigh

I FOUND myself unexpectedly face-to-face with Boris Johnson twice during the many years we lived in London. The first occasion was when it dawned that the jogger in garish shorts bearing down on me while I wandered around the parkland of Highbury Fields was our then Mayor of London. The second time was in the heart of the city, while stepping off the kerb after the lights had changed and realising Johnson was the cyclist who had just pulled up.

On both occasions I found myself uttering the sort of involuntary and slightly embarrassed “hello” on being greeted by a familiar face that I presume famous people are accustomed to receiving wherever they go. And I should point out that he responded charmingly each time with a friendly smile.

Yet on both occasions I also couldn’t help wondering: how come he’s done all this jogging and cycling for years – which he’s now exhorting the rest of us to do in his new anti-obesity drive – but never seems to lose any weight?

DURING ITV’s documentary last week about Princess Anne to mark her 70th birthday, an officer of the King’s Hussars, of which she is colonel-in-chief, gasped as he came across a photograph of her from the 1970s firing a gun without wearing ear defenders during a regimental visit. He hurriedly insisted that wouldn’t be allowed to happen now.

Meanwhile, over on BBC One’s Jack Whitehall’s Sporting Nation, the host recalled the England cricket captain Mike Brearley

breaking with convention in 1979 by wearing a protective helmet with visor while batting.

I am not denying that both are eminently sensible safety measures.

But the incredulity with which both the Hussars officer and Whitehall greeted each episode, as if it was some sort of medieval practice they had each come across, illustrates how risk-averse as a society we have become in little more than a generation, and goes a long way to explaining our general reaction to Covid-19 now.