Too much travel and too many meetings make it hard to hit the keypad and write stuff here. But, today’s ridiculous preoccupation with David Cameron’s abandonment of his daughter in a pub forced the issue.
Apparently, the Prime Minister and his family went for a pub lunch with friends a couple of months ago. They got in separate cars to go home and only discovered when they got home that their daughter Nancy wasn’t with either of them. She had gone to the loo and got forgotten – being picked up 15 minutes later by a ‘distraught’ father.
I wonder if he was actually ‘distraught’ because he knew the media would get the story and make a meal of it?
Now, I can think of many reasons for criticising David Cameron. In fact, make that ‘many, many reasons’, starting with his policies, going though his values and continuing along the road of his leadership competence. But, to spend a whole day debating his parental competence is just absurd. If anything it exposes the pathetic lack of perspective offered by people who like to point a finger and sneer behind a hand. He didn’t abandon his daughter and she was totally safe while she waited to be picked up.
In other words, this is a non-story. Except, of course, in the hands of those who think it contributes to a growing picture of an incompetent man. Give the guy a break! I don’t ever remember losing my kids in a pub, but I do remember losing sight of my son on the beach once. Cue the media to rubbish my performance as a bishop and a human being.
While I’m at it, what’s all the nonsense about the PM relaxing too much? Haven’t we all complained that people in high-pressure jobs like his need to be counter-cultural and learn to get some space? You know, for weird stuff like thinking or dreaming or reflecting or reading or playing a game? Don’t we constantly hear of PMs from earlier days who used to read widely and write books while thinking about politics and the ways of the world? And don’t we constantly wish our PMs would think more deeply, act more wisely and live more healthily?
Maybe. But we also admire the French for having lunch breaks and sleeping properly at night. And we persist in this ridiculous notion that the PM must flog himself to death just to prove he isn’t slacking while there is so much to do in a tough old world out there. This all becomes a PR game in which too much energy, time and talk goes into creating images instead of dealing with reality.
Time to grow up, I think.
(I forgot to note that the ‘Nancy affair’ reminded me immediately of the episode in the gospels when Mary and Joseph forgot Jesus and left him in Jerusalem for several days. At least when Dave got back to the pub Nancy wasn’t having an argument with the local vicar…)
June 12, 2012 at 7:45 am
I would completely agree with your comments about David Cameron’s parenting – my only concern would be that the security team should have noticed given that is part of their job.
June 12, 2012 at 9:15 am
I think the issue I have with David Cameron’s public chillaxing is that it creates resentment. I presume he has a small army of au pairs, home helps, cleaners, PAs, etc, to enable him to chillax, not to mention he had his wife’s considerable personal wealth. Those of us in demanding jobs and straitened financial circumstances don’t get the opportunity to leave our daughter in the pub, because we don’t have the time and certainly don’t have the money for a family pub lunch. So once again, are we really ‘all in it together’? Don’t think so Mr. Cameron. Come and walk a mile in my shoes
June 12, 2012 at 9:21 am
couldn’t agree more. never ‘abandoned’ any of mine in a pub, but lost a couple now and then; they seem to have survived quite well. As for growing up? way beyond time I think.
June 12, 2012 at 9:49 am
I reckon that David Cameron is so used to nannies taking care of the sprogs that he and his wife actually forgot they had children!
So the nanny had a day off eh
June 12, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Perhaps the story would have had less impact if he hadn’t spent recent weeks launching parenting classes or talking about troubled families.
June 12, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Is (Joseph and) Mary’s abandonment of Jesus at the Temple proof of her lack of perpetual sinlessness? Please inform.
June 12, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Certainly trivial set alongside the disasters he’s responsible for, and we have all made mistakes while looking after our children. But forgetting one when leaving a pub after Sunday lunch is riskier than anything Maddie’s parents did, and this incident highlights the difference between the hyper rich Camerons and most of us.
Couples I’ve known divide the labour of parenting so that at least one checks wether all the children are suitably herded before moving on. The Camerons may have nannies, security men etc but doing that is so basic that forgetting is a very bad sign of dysfunction, worrying.
A sure sign that the PM is more out of touch than I had imagined. And I knew that, when asked before the general election how many
houses he and Samantha had, he’d not known. “I suppose you’ll make a lot of that he said.”
I doubt turning his nose to the grindstone as the estimable Brown did would help much. But neither did the 9 family holidays he enjoyed before the Tottenham Riots last year, nor the one from which he returned on only the third day of the riots.
He might spend more time with his friend Osborne and their families were he to take Tge obvious action …
June 12, 2012 at 5:44 pm
‘LECTIONARY MISSED OPPORTUNITY!’ Luke 2.41ff should have been set for this coming Sunday.
June 12, 2012 at 7:24 pm
MisterDavid, ‘her perpetual sinlessness’ is not something attested in the New Testament anyway…
June 12, 2012 at 9:12 pm
The incident might be thought to set in context both his Bullingdon restaurant smashing misdemeanours of his first two years at Oxford and the moves he supports to set a minimum price/unit of alcohol.
Neither the champers he drank on a plane with his preteen mates, the booze they got drunk on at Oxford, nor the Stella Artois he now drinks (aka “wifebeater”) would be affected by minimum pricing.
But cheap, refreshing, hoppy own brand supermarket bitter 2.1% alcohol by volume @ £1 for four cans of 440 cl will be.
Perhaps Cameron’s embarrassment can teach us and him a little about how public policy may relate rather imperfectly to real life?
He likes to sermonise, but I suspect anything but his shouting is false. Beware politicians beating breasts.