Don’t be fooled by the Lib Dems

The nurses and midwives at St Thomas’s Hospital this week faced a rewarding task: to bring Donald James Kennedy into the world. They could have been as slapdash as they had liked, even pulled the poor chap out by the ears — knowing full well that nothing would have prevented his father bounding down the hospital steps and praising the care and dedication of NHS staff. Never mind Charles Kennedy’s boast that he was going to put parenthood before politics; only the extremely naive would think the Liberal Democrat leader incapable of appreciating the electoral advantages of becoming a father during a general election campaign.

Our complaint is not that the Kennedys deliberately timed the birth of their first child for electoral purposes. So what if they did? The country needs more babies; not least to grow up, pay taxes and help meet the government’s rapidly growing pension liabilities. In fact, we would argue that the more paternity leave Charles Kennedy takes, the better.