An added embarrassment for PM who couldn’t count his children

Our forgetful prime minister and his wife managed to leave their eight-year-old daughter behind at the pub. Sheena Hastings reports.

CHILDREN are slippery creatures, full of energy and curiosity about the world that we generally encourage. But Nancy Cameron didn’t run off into the woods or into the cellar at a pub to sample a bottle of cider. She simply went to the loo by herself, while her parents and their friends gathered themselves up and headed for home after a relaxed Sunday lunch.

The Prime Minister travelled in one car with a security officer, and his wife Samantha was in another, driving their two younger children Arthur, six, and 22-month-old Florence back to Chequers after the gathering with two other families at the the Plough Inn in Calsden, Buckinghamshire, two miles away from the PM’s weekend residence. Each of the parents thought Nancy was in the other car, and it was only on arrival they realised, to their horror, that she was with neither of them. The “distraught” Prime Minister went straight back to the pub to collect Nancy, who had in the intervening 15 minutes been making herself useful.

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No doubt, after heaving a huge sigh relief, both David and Samantha Cameron gave themselves a sharp reminder that, even when you have your own Special Branch detail, the security of your children is down to you and no-one else. No-one’s saying that the Camerons are generally lax regarding the safety of their children, but they will surely have reflected on this incident and felt a certain amount of shame that they didn’t make absolute certain they had all three children with them.

This episode will have sent shivers down the spine of many parents, even though Nancy was fine and probably couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about when Dad turned up looking more strained and stressed than usual, and is unlikely to be scarred for life by the experience of collecting a few glasses while the penny took a quarter of an hour to drop.

The story has sparked many a tale of children left by forgetful parents in shops and post offices, on buses, in cradles under restaurant tables and mislaid in museums. People make mistakes and mostly they don’t end in disaster.

No-one is trying to equate the Camerons’ lapse in vigilance with anyone who deliberately leaves small children home alone all evening while they go boozing, leaving a baby crying for hours in an overheated car or youngsters found abandoned while their feckless parents go on holiday.

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The stories of momentary memory lapses are retold years later with a comical spin, but all the parents involved must secretly look back and thank their lucky stars that the little mishap with their precious child didn’t end in a tragedy.

In the Camerons’ case, one reason they have a 24-hour security detail is that their children could also be a target for terrorism. It’s all too easy to over-react to this unfortunate story – one that is only being reported because it involves the man who runs the country not being organised enough to do a head-count of three children. Fair play, they said the fault did not lie with the security staff; they, the parents, took responsibility for what had happened.

Of course the sabres were out as soon as a Downing Street spokesman gave a statement about the event, which happened some weeks ago.

Tweets and emails flooded in to newspaper websites and online forums. Comments ranged from the appalled fellow parents who would not agree that such a mishap could happen to anyone, including a PM “surrounded by taxpayer-funded’ bodyguards”, to those who said social services would have become involved in cases that were “far more trivial”.

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We’d all like to know where, in these times of austerity and public service cuts, social workers have time to chase up the case of a child found safe where she was left a few minutes before, albeit in the local pub.

Other furious correspondents pointed out that Cameron might, in different circumstances, cite such an error as evidence of the kind of “troubled families” which his collegue Eric Pickles was talking about yesterday.

Such a mistake made in his personal life is bound to have some kind of effect on the reputation of a PM. In David Cameron’s case his critics will see it as all of a piece with the date nights, boxed sets of crime dramas viewed in bed and tennis matches.

While many are suffering from the effects of the disastrous economy he’s in charge of, we don’t need to see our PM being relaxed to the point of flakiness. He’s probably got that now.