The Sketch: The perils of having a Foreign Secretary with no interest in foreign affairs

Debra Shipley is proposing a bill to prevent evil, mind-controlling multinationals from advertising their high-fat, super-sugared over-salted narco-nibbles from being advertised on toddler TV. It's like a cartoon in itself.

Quite apart from the effect their sophisticated mind control has on children, Ms Shipley told the House, the profit-driven hypno-thugs were undermining the efforts of the Department of Health. Obese diabetics under the age of eight are clogging up the health service to the tune of £5bn a year. It is the modern equation. We have the right to tell people to wear their seatbelts, because we have to pay for their treatment in the case of a crash. Fat children are expensive, so we – as a matter of prudence as much as jurisprudence – are not just entitled but actually required to bring their weight into official target range. Liberty will never flourish in a high tax society (anything, that is, above JM Keynes' recommended maximum of 25 per cent of GDP). We've had it, probably, because this government simply refuses to walk on the other side and ignore anyone's unhappiness.

Kim Howells was the minister who had to sit in on this. To his saloon bar credit, he could hardly contain his derision. He wasn't interested in the Keynesian objection, nor the Hayekian principle, he just thought she was a silly, interfering busybody who ought to be organising cake stalls. He didn't say so, but his body language needed no subtitles.

What else? We had a particularly uneventful Foreign Office question time. I seem to remember the British Foreign Office being described as a Rolls-Royce sort of outfit, albeit powered by a Mini economy. Looking at the front bench today, we look like more of a mid-range Toyota, and one that needs – if Denis MacShane's adenoids are to be taken seriously – a lube job.

The lack of doing anything was more than usually pronounced. That may be because handsome Jack Straw has many qualities but doesn't include an interest in foreign affairs among them. When you look through his parliamentary record you find a 20-year-old reference to the disgraceful British practice of buying shirts from Hong Kong, and a junket to Kashmir in the 90s.

Thus an interesting question, such as Vincent Cable's query about how nasty parties in Iraq would be treated (you know – Baath, Communist, and Islamic Jihad) elicits little; or more accurately, nothing. Mike O'Brien told us that any birth was difficult but also wonderful and the birth of Iraq's political culture would be the same. We should throw rocks at him.

Boris Johnson stood up to be greeted, as usual, by the ironic cheers of his party. Mr Johnson suffers from being the finest political humorist of his generation. His prose is beyond price and his sense of humour peerless. This is fatal for a parliamentarian. He has not yet realised this and collaborates in his reputation by meeting cheers with a breathless, "Thank you Mr Speaker, thank you, thank you" for all the world like Tommy Cooper (whose own career stopped abruptly – just like that, in fact). If he doesn't want to stop as abruptly he must at least slow down.

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