Like Boris’s mum, there IS a supreme authority in my house. No prizes for guessing who it is

WHO laid down the law in your household and influenced you most when you were growing up — your mother or your father? The question arises from the Prime Minister’s conference speech this week, in which he declared that his mother was the ‘supreme authority’ in the Johnson family.

Well, that’s put his dad firmly in his place. But then I’m guessing that, like so many of us men, Stanley Johnson was well aware that his wife was the dominant figure in his children’s upbringing. And that was probably even before the couple went their separate ways when Boris was 15.

Indeed, I’m reminded of the great Sir Denis Thatcher’s famous answer when a reporter asked him who really wore the trousers in his family. Without a moment’s pause, the former Prime Minister’s husband and father of her children replied: ‘I do! I wear the trousers . . . and I wash and iron them, too!’

As for me, I prefer to comfort myself with the old wisdom that we fathers concern ourselves with all the important questions: Does God exist?; Is there life after death?; Unilateral nuclear disarmament, yes or no?; Who will win the Rugby World Cup?

Meanwhile, we’re content to leave the trivial decisions to our womenfolk: where we should live; how many children we should have; where they should go to school; what we should eat tonight; where we should go on holiday . . .

Proud

Back at the Tory conference, this was quite a week for acknowledgements from Cabinet ministers of the crucial role their mothers played in shaping their lives.

Setting the ball rolling, Chancellor Sajid Javid welcomed his mum to the audience, saying: ‘You know, 20 years ago Mum thought it was a big deal when she watched the first Asians move into Coronation Street here in Manchester. Well, now she’s watched the first Asians move into Downing Street. Once again, we’re living above the shop. But I’m so happy to make her proud.’

As my fellow political obsessives will know, he went on to address his mother from the platform in Punjabi, asking: ‘Mummy, did you ever think you would be here today? Daddy’s shop used to be just here.’

Relapsing into English, he told the conference: ‘Sorry, that’s between us. I forgot you were there. I was just trying to make her comfortable.’

Now, I’m as cynical an old Fleet Street hand as ever tried to bash out a story against a deadline. ‘About as sensitive as a bog seat,’ as an old university friend once described me. Indeed, in most circumstances I reach for the sick-bag when politicians of any political persuasion go all gooey about their families, in an effort to win the sympathy of an audience.

But for reasons I can’t fully explain, I was touched rather than embarrassed by Mr Javid’s public display of affection for his mum, and his palpable pride in making her proud.

Perhaps this was partly because his rise to the Chancellorship from his origins as the son of poor Pakistani immigrants really is such a remarkable and moving story, thought-provoking testimony to the astonishing social changes we’ve witnessed over the past few decades.

But I reckon it was mostly because we are all hard-wired from infancy to love our mothers, in a way with which we fathers struggle to compete. Yet it’s only very rarely that mums get the public credit they deserve for the love and sacrifices they lavished on us as we were growing up.

Whatever the truth, my former colleague Boris has never been one to miss a trick. Two days later, he was up on his feet, paying his respects to his own mum.

‘I am going to follow the example of my friend Saj,’ he said. ‘I am going to quote that supreme authority in my family — my mother. And by the way, for keen students of the divisions in my family, you might know that I have kept the ace up my sleeve: my mother voted Leave!’

Apparently, this came as news to his Remainer father Stanley, the former MEP who nowadays keeps popping up on reality TV shows and quizzes, or snuggling up on the Gogglebox sofa with the lovely Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo.

Dignity

‘I didn’t know that,’ the microphones caught him saying to his daughter, Rachel, another ardent Remainer like their brother Jo. ‘I did,’ she replied.

All I can say is that Rachel and Jo appear not to acknowledge their mother’s supreme authority, the foolish pair. But I’ll let that pass. It was in the next passage of his speech that Boris struck a more serious note.

‘My mother taught me,’ he said, ‘to believe strongly in the equal importance, the equal dignity, the equal worth of every human being on the planet — and that may sound banal but it’s not.’

For a moment, I was tempted to dismiss this as fake news. After all, it’s very hard to imagine any mother sitting her child down and saying: ‘I want you to remember this, my boy. Every human being on the planet is equally important, with equal dignity and equal worth.’

But, of course, that’s not how mothers work. They teach by instructing us to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, or by rebuking us for laughing at people less fortunate or different from ourselves. Above all, they teach by example.

So, yes, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that Boris’s mother did teach him to respect everyone equally (though when I hear him on the hustings, or read his newspaper columns, I sometimes have doubts about how deeply the lesson sank in).

Indeed, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realise how much my own mother shaped my attitude to life, through her selfless determination to battle on without complaint through the worst that fate could throw at her. I can’t remember her ever displaying a trace of self-pity over the trials of looking after a totally blind husband and four fractious children.

Throughout her long life, she also made time for charity work, first as a voluntary nurse in the war, then helping to settle immigrant families in Britain and later, in her old age, teaching disadvantaged children to read. But never once did she trumpet her virtues or preach to us.

Distinguished

Alas, I can’t claim to have inherited many of her qualities, apart from her hopelessness with money and a tendency to lose important letters. On the other hand, she most certainly taught me to admire moral courage, kindness and good works in others.

But was she the ‘supreme authority’ in the Utley family as I was growing up? I think not. As she would have been the first to agree, I reckon that title must go to my father.

Yes, we saw a great deal more of her than of him during my childhood, since he was working most of the time. And yes, she tended to look after the little things, deciding where we should live, which schools we should attend and the rest.

But my father — described by Lady Thatcher on his death (stop me if I’ve told you this) as ‘the most distinguished Tory thinker of our time’ — was no publicityseeking flibbertigibbet like Stanley Johnson. Indeed, I defy anyone to have been brought up by that towering intellect without recognising him as the boss.

What is undeniably true is that my three siblings and I — Tories and Leavers to a man and woman — learned our politics from our father. Like him, the four of us attach enormous value to independent institutions and the glories of the British Constitution, which John Bercow and the Supreme Court are merrily shredding.

I only wish the same could be said for my own branch of the family. For although Mrs U and I are both Tory-voting Leavers, we appear to have bred three Corbynistas and one Lib Dem — all four of them rabid Remainers.

Oh, where did we go wrong? For the answer to that, you’ll have to ask the supreme authority in my family. And there are no prizes for guessing that’s my wife.