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In the Commons the government chief whip, Chris Heaton-Harris, has just moved the writ for two forthcoming byelections - in Wakefield, and in Tiverton and Honiton.

Both byelections are expected to be held on Thursday 23 June - the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum.

Under pressure from some Conservative MPs, some of whom have been threatening to write letters of no confidence in Boris Johnson unless they get their way, ministers have retreated from banning “Buy One Get One Free” deals and from imposing a watershed of 9pm on junk food advertising. While some measures, such as rules on the positioning of unhealthy foods by retailers, will still go ahead in October, this U-turn adds to the long history of failed obesity strategies.

Humans evolved, when food was scarce, to indulge in calorie-dense foods if the opportunity arose. Now, the abundance of food and its particularly highly processed nature, which means we go on eating for a long time before feeling full, leads us to eat a lot of the wrong things. Food companies have an overwhelming incentive to design products that lead us ever further down this chemically induced addiction to foods that make us overweight, more prone to disease, and less able to work and enjoy life to the full. This is not freedom ...

Freedom is, most crucially, being free from oppression, violence or discrimination. But it is also the freedom of a child to skip and somersault; of an adult to enjoy running down a country lane or in a city park; of an old person to keep their quality of life until their final days ... These are the freedoms being denied to vast numbers of people who are the victims, not the free agents, in a system that wants to fill them up with salt, sugar and saturated fat.

It is therefore a terrible error to associate conservatism with a reluctance to protect people from their natural appetites being abused, in an industrial age for which they were not designed. If we could liberate more people from that fate, they could enjoy greater personal freedom and have some chance of a lighter tax burden.

MPs who have pressed, seemingly successfully, for the dilution of the obesity strategy are profoundly mistaken. They are acquiescing in a future of higher dependence, greater costs, reduced lifestyle choice and endless pain. For the government to give in to them is intellectually shallow, politically weak and morally reprehensible.