What did Jamie Oliver do to hurt anyone?

To quote Lansley in today's Guardian:

"If we are constantly lecturing people and trying to tell them what to do, we will actually find that we undermine and are counterproductive in the results that we achieve," Lansley told the annual conference of the British Medical Association, the doctors' trade union.

"Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children, but the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn't go up, it went down," he said.

And that's the point of the Big Society, surely. It's knowing what is right and standing up and making it happen. Jamie Oliver could, very easily, have just ignored the problem and kept turning out the TV shows, written more books and opened more expensive restaurants.

But he didn't - he stood up for what he believed in and, as a result, school meals are healthier. If fewer children are eating them, then there's a job to be done by the government to convince parents not to fill their kids up with bad food. If Lansley is determined to run a more efficient NHS, then he needs to make sure that his department is also taking steps to stop people getting ill in the first place. Prevention is better than cure, you could say. Would he rather schools started serving turkey twizzlers again, just to bulk up numbers eating school food? That's the logical conclusion of this argument.

And rather like his numpty colleague at the Culture department (Jeremy Hunt), Lansley got his facts wrong. School meal numbers fell when Oliver revealed how crap they were - they've been rising since. So not only was his attack on one of the few celebrities to embrace big society unfair, it was also incorrect.

The impact of Lansley's statement rippled across to the education department, which was forced to insist that it had no plans to reduce the nutritional standards brought in after Oliver's campaign. So Lansley, to recap, had a pop at someone who embodied Cameron's big idea, using incorrect facts, on a subject which has chuff all to do with him.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised now that his plan to hand commissioning powers from primary care trusts to individual GPs will end up costing the country more, not less.

In the last week, the Home Office has angered business with plans for an immigration cap, upset health experts with Lansley's comments and upset Liverpool with Jeremy Hunt's careless comments. The honeymoon is over - and the Government needs to start listening.