Congratulations to Marcus Rashford on his MBE for his work to alleviate child hunger in a first world country. In these times, we might very well celebrate altruistic star leverage of personal influence. Most of them are out sharking social media and spouting fatuous twaddle in order to scoop up a sackful of Twitter or Instagram followers. He’s clearly a good bloke who has kept his feet on the ground.

That in turn puts all our familiar super-woke clowns to shame for their empty social action pledges while coining in endless heaps of media cash.

Most astounding about the honour, though, was the sheer pace at which it zoomed through the treacle of turgid Cabinet Office considerations. Their own blurb notes that the process takes ‘at least 18 months’.

But hang on a moment. The Government, who have a duty of care for citizen welfare, has expedited a gong to somebody who had actually held them to account for their abject failure regarding their statutory responsibility.

How far have we tumbled down the slope of crass absurdity when a Government can so blatantly ignore their responsibilities but then rush through a hush-gong to placate the public and the person who blew the whistle on their failure? Mere adjectives no longer quite do the job.

But before we stomp mealy-mouthed Johnson and his brazen buffoons into the dust for their failure to put meals in mouths, let’s not forget the role the Labour Party played in all this.

Sorry, I had forgotten. That would be none, though they did try to harvest much of the credit for the policy volte-face.

But back to the Charlatan in Chief and his amalgamation of asinine asshats. A familiar refrain at the start of the COVID calamity was that the government would be ‘guided by science’. Well, here’s a piece of science for them to consider: Newton’s 3rd Law:

‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’.

If Rashford deserved to receive an accolade, then the Government should have correspondingly lost something of equal value. The logic would have been that the status of the award had reflected the gravity of the issue that the striking ace resolved.

Most apt would have been the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families getting turfed out, perhaps, and cast into political oblivion? That might at least have reflected that the Government had seen itself as accountable and had even taken the matter seriously?

But no – not one soupcon of contrition, and the medal marks the end of it. This is a government that will neither acknowledge their mistake nor hold the free school meals omissions to have been one in the first place. They simply got their pants pulled down in a high-profile manner and back-pedalled, and they are now back peddling the same old humbuggery.

Some people might slate our younger generations, but thank God, some of them are standing up for what is right.

Somebody has to.