It’s best if prime ministers keep their children private

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 16 March 2014, 09:01 Last update: about 11 years ago

David Cameron took his small daughter to nursery school some days ago and the resulting photographs were published throughout the British press and even in France. In all of those I saw, the little girl’s face had been obscured by pixelation or other means. I couldn’t help making a comparison with the way our own prime minister and his wife ruthlessly exploit their twins to augment their own image – a sort of reflected glory, if you like. “Here are two sweet girls, therefore we must be sweet too because we created them.” Not only are their faces never obscured in press photographs and on television, but their parents actively encourage exposure, pushing the little girls into the frontline wherever possible and often where it is not appropriate.

All our prime ministers within living memory have had children, except for Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, who is a bachelor. None of them have behaved like this. The only time we got to see their children, adult or otherwise, was on the palace balcony after their father took his oath of office. Then they disappeared and most people couldn’t even tell you how many children each prime minister had, what they look like, whether they are sons or daughters, and what their names are. But we all know that this prime minister has twin daughters, roughly what their age is, what their baptismal names are and what they are now called instead, and what they look like because we are shown their faces all the time.

Alfred Sant, when he became prime minister, had an 11-year-old daughter. The public saw her only once: on the palace balcony after he was sworn in. She then disappeared immediately from public view and she would not be recognised, nor would people even know her name. If there was one man who could have really used the image-softening help of a charming little daughter with a doting daddy, it was Sant. But he had the common sense to keep her out of the limelight. He did not sacrifice her privacy to his own personal and political advantage. He did not, in short, use her.

Mintoff had legions of obsessed supporters who would more accurately be called devotees, but how many of them even knew he had children, what they were called, or what they looked like? I don’t imagine that this was through any special effort on his part: doting daddy, like uxorious husband, would not have suited the brutal strongman image he worked so hard, as an individual of unprepossessing physical size (he was of miniature proportions), to nurture. His daughters were whisked away to England by their mother shortly after 1960, when they were little older than the Muscat twins are now, and placed in school there. The Maltese public never saw them, and only discovered what one of them looks like when she suddenly appeared at her father’s deathbed two years ago on her retirement as a schoolmistress, after a lifetime in England and the United States, and used that deathbed as a launch pad for an aborted political career. Yana Mintoff thought that using her father’s name would be enough to guarantee success, but the reality is that people just didn’t know her. Most did not even know of her existence, because few read the British newspapers in the early 1970s and so would not have read the news stories in which she and her IRA boyfriend featured in an incident involving horse manure and the House of Commons. When she materialised seemingly out of nowhere, after half a century of absence from Malta, her father’s devotees did not have sufficient time to adjust. As for Mintoff’s other daughter, if you were to ask people what her name is, few would be able to tell you, and none would be able to describe her because she has never made a public appearance or had her photograph published.

Who can name Lawrence Gonzi’s children, or even say how many he has and whether they are sons or daughters? Not many, I’ll wager. The only reason we know the name of just one of Eddie Fenech Adami’s children is because he is in politics and now deputy leader of the Nationalist Party. But ask people how many children this former prime minister has and they will hum and haw before guessing – four? Five? Six? Ask them to say how many sons and how many daughters, and they will give up before they start. Don’t even bother asking them whether they know their names, because that’s a non-starter.

The only reason I knew that George Borg Olivier had two sons and one daughter and what their names were is because they were a neighbourhood family and not because he was the prime minister. Had that not been the case, I would have been as unaware of his children as most other people.

The Prime Minister and Mrs Muscat are doing something that has not been done before, and it’s not good. Using their little girls might appeal to a section of the public who will not see those children as being used, but to another section of the public their moves in this regard come across as increasingly cold and cynical. Also, it exposes the parent-child relationship to scrutiny by the public, and this is not the most brilliant idea. Mrs Muscat comes across as besotted with her daughters in the unrelaxed, controlling and project-managed way that appears to be peculiar to those women who have had children with great difficulty and later in life, and who cannot behave naturally with them or let them be. Meanwhile, daddy comes across as rather less than doting, like a 1950s father who is not quite sure whether he is simulating interest in quite the appropriate manner, while dying to get away to something he prefers doing.

For everybody’s sake, not least theirs, those two small girls should be kept out of public view. It won’t be long before they’re teenagers, and they won’t be thanking their parents for all the early exposure. It might be Mrs Muscat’s idea of heaven and living the dream, but children tend to see these things differently.