It is hard to imagine any British prime minister has been through such a rollercoaster of personal emotion in the space of four months as Boris Johnson. Only a month ago the prime minister was in a hospital ward wondering whether the coronavirus that continued to grip his lungs would mean that he would die in office only three months after securing a resounding personal mandate from a Brexit-weary electorate.
If things had gone a different way in St Thomas’ hospital, to use Johnson’s own phrase, he would indeed have died in public office, probably the most famous of the 218,000 victims of coronavirus worldwide. Now a month later, and possibly many weeks before he or his fiancee Carrie Symonds had expected, he was rushed back to hospital, but to see the delivery of his child. Symonds is herself only just recovering from the same virus.
No date can yet be set for their summer wedding, the first involving a serving prime minister since 1822, as no date has been set by the prime minister to allow large gatherings to go ahead. If all this seems like an overblown episode of a very modern family soap opera, and somewhat distracting in the midst of the biggest shock to the British economy since the second world war, do not forget that the final terms of his disputed divorce settlement with Marina Wheeler have only just been sorted. The bruised emotions of his children from previous relationships also need tending to. Many previous prime ministers have had overcrowded messy private lives, but rarely has the professional and personal plate of a British prime minister been piled so high. This is match, hatch and near dispatch on steroids. But it is not as if Downing Street has not in the recent past coped with the tiny patter of prime ministerial offspring. A consequence of the youthfulness of contemporary British politicians is that three of the four most recent prime ministers, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, all had young children bouncing in the Downing Street rose garden. Blair arrived in No 10 with three children already in tow, and an established skill at using his family to project an image of modern masculinity. In Parent magazine in 1996, one of innumerable such personal interviews, the strapline read: “Being a dad is harder than being a politician.”
When he discovered in office that his wife, Cherie, was pregnant for a fourth time, Blair’s reaction, according to his communications adviser Alastair Campbell, was a mixture of horror, pleasure and disbelief. “Thank God, I am Christian. It allows me to think there is a reason,” he told Campbell. When the newspapers were told Blair was to be a father and this was the first baby born to a serving prime minister since Lord John Russell in 1849, “money could not buy the publicity we are getting”, Campbell gushed. Campbell had been worried the news would be greeted with cynicism, or even alarm at the potential distraction. On the day of Leo’s birth, Blair appeared on the steps of Downing Street with a mug decorated with a picture of his older children. But he also reassured an adjusting public that he would get his work-life priorities right. “I would be kidding you if I was to say: ‘for x period of time I’m not going to pick up the phone, I’m not going to talk to anyone, if there’s a crisis in the country or the world that I’m not going to be interested. That’s ridiculous. You can’t do that in my job. The important thing is to help Cherie and the baby. I will, obviously, try as much as possible to cut down in that period what I’m doing. But I have to run the country. That still has to go on.” Those who know him best say one of Blair’s special skills is his ability to compartmentalise. One minute he is negotiating the resignation of a Welsh secretary caught in a sex scandal, the next he is gladhanding at a diplomatic reception, and then he is upstairs in the flat discussing his children’s biology homework. The great aspiration is normality. Protecting the children physically from the media is merely a matter taking them out the back to school. It requires passing a few offices, but is hardly intrusive. Protecting them mentally is harder. By contrast Gordon Brown, who in the Treasury had introduced two weeks’ paid paternity leave and became a father at the age of 50, was reluctant to merge his public persona and private life. That is in part a function of tragedy: his first child, Jennifer, died 10 days after birth. But Treasury civil servants remember a happy integration in private, as they stepped over wooden train tracks in his flat discussing the go-ahead for high-speed rail. The more Brown’s spin doctors sought to deploy his family life to humanise his dour image, the more determined he became to protect his children’s privacy. Notoriously driven, private and dissatisfied, Brown just found it near impossible to switch off work, and never warmed to celebrity modern fatherhood. If he mentioned fatherhood in often torturous personal interviews it was often to mention his own father. Reflecting on what parenting had done to him seemed a painful act of sharing.
It was a Conservative, David Cameron, who perfected the image of modern fatherhood inside No 10. At his first Tory conference as leader in 2006, his heavily pregnant wife appeared on stage with him as he patted her stomach. Later, three months after forming a coalition government in 2010, his daughter Florence was born. Cameron never shied away from talking about the influence of his children, including in his speeches, and, without displaying them, never hid them away, allowing them to attend middle-rank receptions, and doing his best to integrate them into an all-consuming life.
On a book tour for his memoir, For the Record, Cameron said Florence, who was only five when the family left Downing Street in 2016, had hardly been scarred by the glare of life in No 10. He told the Cheltenham literature festival that his daughter had asked him only last summer: “Daddy, is it true, were you actually the prime minister?” If Johnson’s latest offspring can end his period in No 10 as ignorant of his father’s occupation, he, and his parents will have done well.