Will Jamie turning ‘ninja’ scare the government into a sugar tax u-turn?

When he first launched his campaign last August, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver declared he was “utterly confident” David Cameron would do a u-turn after repeated government denials that it planned to launch a sugar tax.

He also described the context of his call to a government elected on the back of a pro-business, anti-regulation agenda as “the most ridiculous in the world”.

However, judging by the appearance of Oliver and health secretary Jeremy Hunt on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday, both those assessments seem to have changed.

For a start, Oliver seemed a lot less confident in Cameron. No more Mr Nice Guy here as our Jamie resorted to threatening to “get more ninja”, to “go a bit more underground” and “a little bit less nice”.

And at a stroke the assertion that last summer was the “most ridiculous context in the world” changed, too.

Surely nothing could be more ridiculous, whatever your views on the rights and wrongs of a tax, than a PM changing course based on threats of a celebrity chef “turning ninja”.

Yet judging by the remarks of Hunt immediately afterwards, this could turn into a reality.

Despite his department categorically ruling out plans for a sugar tax on at least three more occasions to this publication and others since Oliver’s August campaign launch, Hunt explained that the government “has not taken a sugar tax off the table”, and did little to dispel the notion that he is himself in favour.

If the government did not press ahead with a sugar tax, continued Hunt, it would come up with something “equally robust”.

It’s difficult to see what else would be viewed by campaigners as robust enough to stop Oliver, meat cleaver in hand, setting off on a mission to assassinate his ministerial victims one by one.

And as the government continues to box itself into a corner, the prospect of that mother of all u-turns remains in the shadows.