Like millions of non-Americans hooked on the US election, I’m backing someone even though I don’t have a vote. I love Cruz and I’m not ashamed to say it. I’m not talking about the oleaginous Ted, but Caroline, his seven-year-old daughter. Caroline is that rare thing in politics — an actual human being. Her eyes glaze over in campaign videos as she’s forced to deliver a succession of facile lines. She ruins coordinated photocalls by making bunny ears behind her dad’s head and refusing to hug him for the cameras. She slumps, listening to endless mind-numbing speeches at never-ending rallies, very obviously bored out of her mind.
She is the antithesis of Chelsea Clinton — so primped, every bit as ruthless as her mother. She shows up the older Trump children for the pawns they are. In her petulant apathy, Caroline is just like us, the people.
But the main reason I like Caroline is that I used to be her, on a much smaller stage. As the youngest child of former Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay, I know how tiresome it can be to have a politician for a father.
I was born two weeks before the Greater London Council election in 1981. The first picture taken of me was printed in the Surrey Comet in a piece about my father’s candidacy. My mother looked elated, exhausted and beautiful in a William Morris-patterned dressing gown. I was in her arms, my two brothers at her side. It was the first and last time I co–operated in presenting my father as the perfect family man.
In 1983, my family was marshalled again, this time for his election leaflet as a prospective MP. At the precise moment the picture was taken, I crapped all down my brother’s leg.
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