London - No one can escape the election. It’s even started to take over on the home front, with personal election fever dominating the Candy household over the school holidays.
Our domestic election has little to do with the real politics going on all around us, though I reckon the tactics are just as corrupt. But it does have everything to do with the relentless jockeying of parental politics. Over Easter, both candidates were lobbying aggressively for the majority vote even though it’s not a level playing field: the favourite has been in the lead since his constituents started walking, and he’s particularly popular with female voters.
When he’s not cutting toast into animal shapes for the youngest, our hero is making late-night chocolate trips to the shops for the pre-teens and playing endless games of Junior Monopoly to secure the minority male vote.
I find it extremely frustrating that Mr Candy enjoys a comfortable majority in the ‘favourite parent’ poll, just because he wears the ‘fun hat’ more often than I do.
This is especially true during holidays, when the luxury of time allows him to polish his do-gooding dad halo.
On our break in Cornwall last week, I could barely hide the glow of jealous maternal anger as he ignored the responsibility of small details, like wearing coats in the rain or ensuring at least one green vegetable is eaten over a five-day period, opting instead for a manifesto pledge of chips with everything, never wearing socks and ginger nuts before breakfast.
This is the equivalent of Boris Johnson running for prime minister. The flaxen-headed funster once supposedly pledged: ‘Voting Tory will ensure your wife has bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW.’
Obviously, Mr Candy has the freedom to promise whatever he likes because he’s not in power and shackled by the deathly dull demands of day-to-day governing/parenting. I am the darned PM aren’t I?
And my husband is always in people-pleasing mode like Nigel Farage, sipping pints and gleefully offering up fantasy policies he won’t be able to deliver in real life (or when the four kids, aged three to 12, go back to school).
Of course he’s going to be a more popular alternative next to yours truly, Captain Sensible.
Mr Candy’s policies may be more exciting but he can’t promise them a ‘brighter, more secure future’, as David Cameron might say, because his future seems to involve them never cleaning their teeth or going to bed before midnight. That way a toothless, irritable future lies.
Why is it that dads always manage this political triumph? It’s the same in almost every household I know: the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ is won by fathers. ‘Why can’t you be more like Dad?’ they announced, after I’d refused them a giant ice cream ten minutes before lunch.
‘We vote for Dad, he’s our favourite parent,’ they chorused. Indeed, why can’t I be the female version of Dad? Why is Mom always the grown-up? Why am I the one who has to remember the correct number of towels to bring and where the sun cream that’s not out of date is?
For a couple of days I did try to be ‘fun Mom’ but it was as uncomfortable as wearing shoes a size too small that you bought because you liked the colour.
I gave up during a trip to a farm. ‘Look, Mom,’ they fizzed. ‘Dad’s gone into the tiny tube in the playground with Mabel. He crawled all the way through with her so she isn’t scared.’
Indeed he had. Another mom was cheering him. I took a picture. ‘Do you wish I was more fun like Dad, too?’ I asked Mabel, later.
‘I wish you were a unicorn,’ she replied seriously, ‘and I wish I was a mermaid.’
He may have a 75 percent majority, but there was still a floating voter. ‘Do you want an ice cream?’ I asked.
* Lorraine Candy is editor- in-chief of Elle magazine.
Daily Mail