Wes Streeting's fat jab dream has one huge hulking problem people are missing

The problem with Wes Streeting's promise to deliver fat-busting jabs and pills to one and all is that it is one more tick for the nanny state. Scoff and booze yourself senseless with impunity, is the message. Don't you worry about a thing. Our collapsing NHS has plenty of better things to do than to nurture the lazy, the greedy and the self-neglecting. But never mind that, we will be here for you come what may, dishing out medication that the health service can ill-afford in an effort to fix you, even though the responsibility for fixing fatness is your own.

Yes, there are those for whom obesity is an aspect of other health conditions which they cannot help, and for whom losing weight would improve life expectancy and quality of living. Most of us, be honest, cannot claim that. The promise of a free safety net and an antidote to over-indulgence, as the gormless Health Secretary has indicated, is a paunchy policy that threatens to blow up in this government's face. Remember Bruce, the character in Roald Dahl's Matilda, who devours chocolate cake to the point that he almost explodes?

You wanted cake, you got cake ... now EAT IT!

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Until Covid killed off many of them, book festivals rode the crest of a lucrative wave featuring celebrities who had turned to writing.

Few 'proper' authors could compete. Things looked precarious. Just back from the legendary Wigtown book festival in south-west Scotland, to which I was invited to talk about my latest, Love, Freddie, based on Freddie Mercury's secret journals, I bring good tidings.

While television news faces were out in force - Reeta Chakrabarti, Gavin Esler, John Suchet, Rory Cellan-Jones - and although former Scotland first Minister Nicola Sturgeon cleaned up and comic actor Helen Lederer was set to descend, there was not a whiff of multi-million-selling Richard Osman, David Walliams or Graham Norton.

Publishers adore people with platforms. Mammoth sales of books by celebrities are said to drive readers to other authors. Really? Meanwhile, as Wigtown and others recognise, writing for many remains a full-time job. There must always be a place for even the humblest self-published author. There it was.

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Michael Ball started it on his Radio 2 Sunday morning show. Some TV newsreaders grabbed the ball and ran with it, and now I find I can barely move for talk of it.

The debate is whether to turn on the heating or defer until November, piling on jumpers in the meantime and deploying extra duvets at night. But what of pensioners deprived of the winter fuel allowance that was so cruelly denied them last year?

Some nine million individuals with an annual income of less than £35,000 will apparently receive it this winter. If your income is deemed to be sufficient, HMRC will give it still, but will later claw the payment back. It's all too complicated.

Confused as to whether they can afford to heat their homes, countless elderly people will avoid the risk, and will sit there suffering in the cold. A heartless system of give and take punishes the most vulnerable. There are better ways than this.

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Water voles, said to be the UK's fastest-declining mammals, have been successfully reintroduced to a stretch of the upper River Lea in Hertfordshire. Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust say they have returned 100 of the animals, whose existence was threatened by the non-native American mink.

The voles, hailed as mini-ecosystem engineers, improve river health by maintaining banks and promoting plant diversity. They are also an important food source for stoats and birds of prey. Increasing and improving biodiversity is always a noble cause. But who let the minks out in the first place?

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A devoted fan of Thunderbirds during my childhood, I was delighted to see lovely Dee Anderson celebrating the 60th anniversary of the animated series' first broadcast in 1965. Husband and wife team Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Dee's parents, famously created the children's science fiction series using unprecedented supermarionation techniques.

They even modelled the International Rescue Tracy family's posh London agent Lady Penelope on Sylvia herself. But her mother didn't get the recognition she deserved, her daughter argues. "Mum came up with all the characters and was the voice of Lady P," she reminds us.

International Thunderbirds Day was honoured with a BAFTA celebrity lunch, at which a special seat was unveiled in Sylvia Anderson's name to recognise her pioneering efforts on behalf of women working in TV and film. Well, we know what butler Parker would have said to that: "YESSS, Milady."