Dalrymple had this piece on obesity in the Daily Telegraph a few days ago wherein he attributes the problem not to the lack of healthy dietary options available to the poor but to “the culinary ignorance, incompetence and indifference of a substantial minority” of the population and “a sense in these circumstances of meaninglessness, that nothing much matters”.

And am I the only reader to find hilarity in lines like this one, which he could probably insert into many of his articles?

Things are worse in Britain than anywhere else in Europe, but my patriotism forces me to concede, not without a certain relief, that matters are deteriorating abroad, too.