Dominic Lawson has written a response today. I know a lot of people won't use DM links so am copying it below. I think he makes a very measured point and is absolutely right:
'Having a prominent politician for a parent is a mixed blessing. But I’m grateful that my father never asked any of his children to play a part in his election campaigns — aside from posing for a local photographer for his constituency manifesto.
On the other hand, my father never aspired to become Prime Minister: he achieved the summit of his ambition as Chancellor.
This is not true of David Cameron and Ed Miliband. The former desperately wants to remain Prime Minister after the General Election on May 7; and the latter, with almost disturbing intensity, wants to snatch the keys of 10 Downing Street from him.
In this cause, both have paraded themselves with their children at home for the BBC’s cameras — and as both men’s children are young and photogenic, there must be the hope on their part that the nation’s voters will go aaaah (rather than the usual grrrr, when they see a politician on his own).
In this political cross-fire of the cute kiddies, David Cameron yesterday launched the biggest bombardment yet, making public photographs of a one-year-old Florence Cameron sitting inside the Prime Minister’s red box and of Nancy and Elwen standing on their own (and looking a bit miserable) on the steps of 10 Downing Street. I suppose the intended message of the latter was: vote Conservative or these poor children will be homeless.
If so, I don’t think it will help Cameron — and not just in the sense that it will make it much more difficult for him to demand privacy for his children in the future. Those who were unsure whether or not they would vote Conservative are as likely to be irritated as they are enchanted: they may feel this looks altogether too proprietorial, as if Cameron treats the trappings of power like an heirloom. They may also feel they are being manipulated.
This is a particular danger with the most poignant part of the accompanying interview with his wife Samantha, in which she tearfully discussed their first-born child, Ivan, who died at the age of six in 2009. And in yesterday’s Sunday Times, her husband also spoke in detail about their late son.
As the parent of a child with a disability, I absolutely understand why they should have done this. To a large extent a family revolves around the needs of such a child — and Ivan’s needs were extreme: he had Ohtahara syndrome, a condition that combines severe cerebral palsy with epilepsy. Ivan was not only unable to communicate: he suffered constant fits.
Friends of the Camerons talk with awe about the way David and Samantha coped with this emotional burden and the love and tenderness they showed their profoundly disabled child.
My wife, Rosa, told me about how, when she interviewed Cameron for a BBC programme she presented about disabled children and their families shortly after Ivan had died, her very mention of his son provoked uncontrollable tears in the then leader of the Opposition.
In this political cross-fire of the cute kiddies, David Cameron yesterday launched the biggest bombardment yet, making public photographs of a one-year-old Florence Cameron
Interestingly, his chief spin doctor at the time, Andy Coulson, told Rosa that they did not want this bit of the film to be broadcast — and it never was.
But the purpose of her film — When A Mother’s Love Is Not Enough — was to try to get both national and local authorities to improve the care and help they give to parents (usually mothers, since so many fathers run away from such a situation).
In her 2009 filmed interview with David Cameron, she urged him — if he became Prime Minister — to end the immensely complex system of multiple agencies dealing with children with profound disabilities and to create a sort of one-stop-shop, so parents were not confronted with dizzyingly complex and impenetrable walls of bureaucracies.
He said he thought that was a good idea. But in five years not a step has been taken to bring that about.
David Cameron is a patron of the charity KIDS, for the families of children such as Ivan — and my wife is its president. In that role, she hears many stories of how badly such families are treated, when they seek some sort of respite. I have the emails of two such mothers in front of me, as I write.
One has, among several children, a daughter with the most severe imaginable disabilities (I know, because they have spent a weekend at our home). Tellingly, she has been forced to take her local authority to court in pursuit of better support.
Her latest email reports: ‘I have now had two visits to court and things are slowly looking up. The judge ordered social services to sit down with me and ask me what respite I needed to care for [my daughter] as currently it is less than two hours a week.
‘I now have a care package in place — thank you, judge!!! — yet conveniently said social worker and manager are now on leave for a combined total of five weeks which means it’s being delayed as no one is contactable . . . they did get a telling off as they hadn’t even requested [my daughter’s] medical notes or had any actual evidence to put to the court.
‘I can’t help but feel angry that all the money they are ploughing into a court case could be spent much more effectively on families and that the only way to secure much needed support is to go through such a process.’
Another mother, whose son has acute cerebral palsy, epilepsy, incontinence, autism and deformities, is moving to the age when he is technically no longer a child (though he has a mental age of one): yet he’s been turned down for the NHS’s Continuing Healthcare Plan.
In her email she writes: ‘The system for disabled children is a cruel and wicked one that “murders” families. It eventually suffocates them, taking away everything the family has and stripping them of every ounce of energy and fight they have . . . it creates an endless vortex of mess and chaos.’
It is obvious to anyone that there should be a simplification of the bureaucracy involved in these cases, which adds immensely to the financial as well as the emotional cost.
And — as the Centre For Welfare Reform argues in its pamphlet Who Cares? — there should also be an advocacy service for the intellectually disabled which is genuinely independent and not tied administratively to the statutory services.
Samantha Cameron spoke movingly in yesterday’s interview about how Ivan’s needs — until they were helped by respite care — left the family ‘totally shattered and pretty much at breaking point’. Her husband should do something — as the Prime Minister he is asking us to endorse at the ballot box — to help other, less well-connected families in the same predicament.'