Cameron takes on bad dads

It’s Fathers’ Day today — and David Cameron is marking it with an extraordinary attack on those dads who are AWOL. It comes in one paragaph of an otherwise excellent and moving piece for the Sunday Telegraph (albeit one that downplays the role of the taxman), in which he says that men leaving their family is “beyond the pale”; that such fathers should feel the “full force” of society; and goes as far as comparing them to drunk drivers. This is a brave move — in the Sir Humphry sense of the word — for three reasons.

1. Britain has more absent fathers than any country in the EU.
That’s numerically: as a proportion, only in Estonia do single mothers compose a larger chunk of the electorate. Perhaps Cameron is appealing to single mothers here. But in Britain, these dads are in their millions — and they may now think twice about voting Conservative.