Jayne Dowle: Never mind the school run, Nick, what about the country?

I mean, when I’ve got a busy week, such as when I’m teaching in Huddersfield and I’ve got a lot of writing deadlines and stuff, I don’t always take the kids to school. If their dad’s at home, he walks with them, or I arrange a few breakfast sessions at granny and grandad’s or at the out-of-school-club. My friend has to start work in Rotherham way before 9am, so she very rarely takes her daughter to school. Instead, her dad drops her off in his zappy little sports car. If we’re trying to impress, how cool is that, huh? Two other friends, with a job-share, split the week between themselves. Do any of these arrangements make us better or worse parents? I don’t think so. Are any of us having to bob out of a breakfast meeting at Number 10 to do them? Er, no.

So if we ordinary working parents don’t make such a big deal of it, why does your family have to? Is it because you want to prove how desperately “one of us” you are, even though by all reports you have got a “fantastic” nanny who could do it for you? How is she employed while you battle your way through the traffic, fretting about Libya while one of the boys throws up his organic granola into his rucksack? If it’s about that yucky “spending quality time with them” thing, then you’re fooling no-one. It’s a myth. Like the golden hour of bedtime. Kids. Car. Early morning. Not enough coffee. It is hardly conducive to father-son bonding. Especially when the battle over Radio 4 versus their favourite music kicks off.

It’s like David and Samantha Cameron when they went on that bucket-shop holiday flight. Or Dave’n’Obama hosting a barbeque in shirts and ties. Or Ed Miliband and his girlfriend being so sixth-form rebellious about not getting married. If the intention is to appear “ordinary”, well, it’s not working. In fact, it’s having the very opposite effect.

It actually makes me grateful for George Osborne, who doesn’t care that everyone knows he is rich and posh. At least he’s honest. He memorably pulled his own kids out of state primary school and sent them private without so much as a brow furrow.

Your government is obsessed with social mobility. Haven’t you noticed that not all parents aspire to a Honda people carrier packed with scrapping offspring? It’s the modern equivalent of the pram in the hall. In certain fantasy worlds, we would wave off the little darlings serenely at the front door, letting someone else take care of the transport arrangements while we went back to business/breakfast/dead-heading the hydrangeas and planning a wildflower meadow.

So bragging about the school run does not impress. Bragging about teaching your kids to walk responsibly to school on their own (thus meeting all those anti-obesity targets you lot go on about, incidentally) does. Bragging about finding the perfect safe spot to open the car door and let them leap out towards the school gate also does. And it teaches them valuable survival skills.

But, you’re the Deputy Prime Minister, so you can’t really do either of the above can you? It would be akin to admitting that you had also found a way to cheat the points on your Tesco Clubcard, and it would surely result in a spell in the Tower, or more likely, being sent off to work on some arcane plan to rescue the economy with Vince Cable.

Shall I say that again? “You’re the Deputy Prime Minister”. Which, roughly translated, means man up, stay at work until the job’s done, don’t let Mrs C boss you around, and stop falling for all those parental clichés that most of us learned to rise above as soon as the kids got out of their Bugaboo. If you really want to “kill yourself” working so hard on behalf of the dear children, then perhaps you could put aside the immediate needs of your own three über-privileged boys for a moment.

There are plenty of kids in this country, some of them, give or take a postal code and an international lawyer for a mummy, in families remarkably like yours, who are having a very tough time right now.

Even having a car to do the blasted school-run in could be looking like a bit of a luxury. If you want to know what it feels like to be ordinary, ask a father who has been made redundant, or a mother borrowing on her credit card to pay the mortgage every month. You’ll find them at any school gate, next time you get the urge to stand there with that smug smile on your face.