WE’RE DONE WITH YOU, TONY

HAVING failed in his ambition to become EU President, Tony Blair is seeking another way to tell us what to do: he has told the American magazine Newsweek of his plans to create a ‘leaders’ club’ — that is, a former leaders’ club — which would offer us all its unique collective wisdom.

Actually, such a body exists already: the late Nelson Mandela set up ‘The Elders’, which has the same purpose. Alas for Blair, it consists of such people as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, all of whom regarded the war on Iraq as an abomination. So Blair will never be invited to join. But he told Newsweek grandly that he must be a global figure as ‘I’ve done British’. The truth is the British have done with him. Wonderful news for those of us charitably described as ‘ big-boned’. The results of a vast medical study published last week show that being fat in middle age reduces the risk of developing dementia. oxon epidemiology, which led a study of two million people with an average age of 55, reported that of those people 45,507 developed dementia within nine years: but the incidence of dementia fell steadily as their weight rose. As someone of average height who struggles to keep his weight much below 15½ stone, this is just what the doctor ordered. Metaphorically, I mean: real doctors never tire of telling me I should lose weight. They might insist that the allegedly overweight suffer less often from dementia because they die younger. But that’s not true, either. A recent u.S. study of more than 250,000 people showed that ‘the lowest risk of all types of mortality as well as heart-related mortality was in those people considered overweight … The highest risk of mortality was in the underweight patients.’ I don’t know why people should be surprised by this. There’s energy in our reserves of fat, and that’s what we need to fight off deadly illnesses. But the dementia result is more mysterious. ours not to reason why, ours but to eat a pie.