The new coalition government is already in Jamie Oliver’s bad books after health secretary Andrew Lansley’s criticised the TV chef’s healthy school dinners campaign.

Oliver’s plan to improve the diet of schoolchildren across England by introducing healthier free school meals had been lauded by the Labour government since its launch eight years ago – but was yesterday branded a failure by Lansley.

“Jamie Oliver, quite rightly, was talking about trying to improve the diet of children,” Lansley said at the annual conference of the British Medical Association. “But the net effect was the number of children eating school meals in many of these places didn’t go up – it went down.”

But Oliver hit back at the comments, which he called an “insult”.

“Any problems that we’ve been having in school meals is more often than not down to continuing lack of funds for training of school catering staff,” Oliver said.

“To say [the campaign] hasn’t worked is not just inaccurate, but is also an insult to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of dinner ladies, teachers, head teachers and parent helpers who strive to feed school kids a nutritious, hot meal for 190 days of the year.”

Meanwhile, the former Naked Chef will return to TV screens today in a new summer ad for Sainsbury’s. Oliver is seen visiting a village fete as well as the beach and a picnic spot.

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