Britain’s Conservative Party has long since adopted the role of being the nanny state’s enforcer: All for the “common good,” I suppose.

Michael Gove is, these days, something of a “Red Tory” and the minister in charge of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, a name to conjure up gloom.

And speaking of depressing names, Britain’s Planning Inspectorate (very roughly, England’s top zoning authority) is an executive agency sponsored by Gove’s department. Its inspectors are appointed by Gove, but are independent. The Daily Telegraph has details of one of its recent decisions:

Michael Gove’s planning officials have blocked pizza chain Papa John’s from opening a new store over fears it would exacerbate childhood obesity.

In what is thought to be the first intervention of its kind, the Planning Inspectorate has rejected an appeal by Papa Johns to open a new site in Tyneside.

The local council brought in rules to curb the opening of takeaway outlets in areas where more than 15pc of year 6 pupils or 10pc of reception pupils are classified as “very overweight”.

Data showed an obesity rate of 21.2pc and 8.9pc for year 6 and reception pupils respectively, according to a recently published appeal decision by the Planning Inspectorate.

Papa John’s told officials that the takeaway chain offers “healthy menu options, shows calorific values and does not fry products in contrast to other takeaways”. In addition, the proposed site was more than 400 metres from a middle or secondary school.

However, the planning inspector concluded that the distance from schools “does not mean that children will not be exposed to its products”.

Permission to set up new pizza places, it seems, is often refused if they are located within 400 yards or so of a school, for, of course, the sake of “the children.” But in Tyneside, it appears that this is not enough. Even though the proposed Papa John’s was more than the requisite distance from a school, the prospect that its dangerous products might still fall into the hands of some youngsters was too awful to contemplate, so this new business was stopped from opening.

The ban on the new outlet is bad enough in its own right, but it is yet another reminder (as if one were needed) that when it comes to the expansion of the nanny state, the slippery slope is all too real. The 400-meter pizza exclusion zone has now been supplemented by something (at least in this case, but there will surely be more) with boundaries determined by capricious, overbearing, and job-destroying regulatory whim.

Worse still, bit by bit, and in large things as well as small, the Conservatives are allowing precedents to be set that will be taken far further by Labour when the Tories are swept out of office in the general election next year.