Personally, I blame the kids
The Labour MP and former minister Malcolm Wicks admitted yesterday that "there is a widespread perception that Labour... is intellectually exhausted".
And, one might add, not just "intellectually exhausted". Exhausted full stop.
Personally I blame the kids. No seriously. An interesting feature of the Blair and Brown governments is just how many leading ministers have young children (by which I mean children under 10).
Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been in this category, of course, and among Mr Brown's senior colleagues, both of the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander all have young children, and those are just the ministers I can think of off the top of my head.
I cannot think of any previous government where this is true. Indeed I can hardly think of any Cabinet ministers in any previous government who had young kids, though there must have been some. The current situation is the product of two trends.
First, the tendency of middle class couples to have children much later - in their 30s and 40s rather than their 20s - and conversely the declining age of Cabinet ministers.
At one point Mr Brown had six Cabinet members under 40.
In the past the children of leading politicians tended to be either teenagers or grown up. And there is another obvious factor, too. These days fathers are expected to play a much bigger role in childcare. Children cannot just be left with the wife or nanny all day, and every day.
I know, as the father of a three-year old, just how difficult it is to get any time to do serious reading at home, let alone have a quiet think and plan ahead. Weekends are fully occupied, and the only spare time is the late evenings when one is already pretty tired. It must be a lot worse for busy ministers with full diaries, constant public pressure, media attention and constituency duties.
Young children are no great respecters of parental sleep. You have to wake up when they wake up. Worse still are those occasions in the middle of the night when they insist on clambering into bed with you, as happens, I'm told, with one senior minister.
Come to think of it, it is remarkable after 12 years in office, that Cabinet members think of anything new, and do not live in a daze of total exhaustion, sleep deprivation and intellectual paralysis. Or some critics might say...
But things could be almost as bad if the Conerservatives are elected next year. Both David Cameron and George Osborne have young children, and so does another leading player Michael Gove.
And just to be balanced, I ought to point out that Nick Clegg has young kids too. Indeed has there ever been a time in British history when all three main party leaders had children?
I'm Michael Crick, and I'm Newsnight's political editor. My guiding rule is that in any story there's usually something the politicians would prefer the world not to know. My job is to find that out. Follow me on
Comment number 1.
At 16th Oct 2009, barry white wrote:Did older politicians just have nannies and then send the children of to boarding school to run the country?
Ah the good old days when we had jobs and industry and the sun shone every day.
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Comment number 2.
At 16th Oct 2009, leftieoddbod wrote:be fair....the weather was better back then...
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Comment number 3.
At 16th Oct 2009, barry white wrote:I was a lot younger as well. It all seemed to be happier as well.
I would like to see them blame the kids, an interesting exchange across the dispatch box.
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Comment number 4.
At 16th Oct 2009, barriesingleton wrote:DO THEY EVEN KNOW THEY HAVE KIDS AT ALL?
If governance was a matter of management rather than a game, the function of individual officers could be kept within human/humane bounds. Unfortunately, Westminster alchemy has serially re-distilled an essence so extreme, that only the most wildly driven of its denizens can cope with its properties, and the result is the mess we find ourselves in today. Weirdoes do not make good MPs.
Stand back Michael, and look with fresh eyes. (Have you read Mullin?) If you were designing a governing body/system - would you start from here?
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Comment number 5.
At 16th Oct 2009, Cassius_voodoo wrote:Surely, cabinet ministers in times of yore had (as the tabloids might have called them) 'love children'. What is novel, perhaps, is how many now have children with their wives (or husbands).
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Comment number 6.
At 16th Oct 2009, The Count wrote:It explains the obsession with "hard working families".
They are just talking about themselves.
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Comment number 7.
At 16th Oct 2009, streetphotobeing wrote:Crick, why don't you do interviews at kings ice rink with mim skating in the back ground, then if they give a dodgy answer mim can slap them on the back of their heads as she skates round at speed. We may get some sense out of them then.
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Comment number 8.
At 16th Oct 2009, streetphotobeing wrote:And I mean the ministers not their children.
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Comment number 9.
At 16th Oct 2009, bookhimdano wrote:nothing to do with kids.
nulabour was based upon market fundamentalism started by thatcher. now that belief has been shown to be false they have no plan b. given the whole neocon narrative has proven to be false they have no plan b. the fundamental change they would need would seem impossible for them to make?
nulabour are like a congregation who have found their beloved pastor not only took the money from the till for drink and drugs but has been in bed with the local miss whiplash. they are shell shocked.
perhaps paul might look at adam smith famous tenet [about markets being the best organiser of a states affairs] and ask if in the financial crash a whole strain of western economic theory been destroyed what is the big idea now?
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Comment number 10.
At 16th Oct 2009, barriesingleton wrote:THE INVERSE TABOO - TODAY'S BIG IDEA (#9)
Subtitle: 'Why Brown's moral compass now points to immorality'.
Money was fine while it had a face value that you could look in the eye.
Gambling, though unproductive and damaging, could not cause real money to lose value. Gambling with an imaginary absence of imaginary money was a long way from the above reality, and made possible because protective taboos gave way to ones that come straight from the Devil (as most PC edicts).
In lay terms: we are consummately auto-stuffed.
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Comment number 11.
At 17th Oct 2009, b-b-jack wrote:You state that:- "Children cannot be left at home all day and every day with the wife or nanny" implicitly implying that the father 'must' be with them some of the time, why?
I accept that it is many years passed that we had young children, so I am probably out of date with current trends. My time was usually at weekends. It was given then that mother stopped work when children arrived and the family relied on fathers' earnings for support.
Admittedly life was much more simple then but families were closer. Maybe that is part of the problem today; not that all was sweet delight, we all had certain troubles but normally families stayed together.
How modern man would cope with yesteryears' ways I do not and never will establish. The question is, what was best for children?
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Comment number 12.
At 18th Oct 2009, stanilic wrote:Since when was it compulsory to beget children? Haven't these people heard of birth control? Or have they all been waiting until their career hits the big money?
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