Dodging a PR disaster

Twenty years after she became a Labour MP, Yvette Cooper is sure of one thing. “Politics is more like an episode of The Thick Of It than you imagine,” she told Tim Jonze in The Observer. The cult TV show, about hapless MPS and the spin doctors who rule them, perfectly captures how accidental PR disasters can loom out of nowhere. “I had to visit a teenage pregnancy centre in Doncaster once and the car wouldn’t start. The rental firm we used sent a stretch limousine for me! I was so embarrassed about turning up in it that I made the driver pull over on a duel carriageway and I walked the final bit of the journey along the hard shoulder.” “Being bored is excellent for creativity,” says Cressida Cowell – and she should know. The children’s author – whose How To Train Your Dragon series has sold around eight million copies worldwide – honed her imagination during long childhood summers spent marooned on a tiny island in Scotland’s Hebrides. Her father, an environmentalist, had bought Little Colonsay as an antidote to London life. “We’d be dropped off like castaways by local boatmen,” she told Sarah Oliver in The Mail on Sunday. “There were no phones or electricity, it was very Robinson Crusoe.” The children learnt to make their own entertainment. “We fished and ate the seafood we caught: mackerel and lobster, cockles, winkles and mussels. We’d explore the caves and go out in rubber dinghies without life jackets. My brother would dive down to look for pearls. God, it was dangerous, looking back. There really were no rules. There was an old bell my mother rang when it was time for lunch, otherwise we were not bothered by adult intervention.” Cowell still goes to the island – now, with her three teenage children. “They suffer withdrawal symptoms,” she admits. “It’s one of those rare places that still has no mobile phone connection. But once they are over that they play cards and acting games, watch otters and catch fish, paint and explore caves, and get bored – just like we did.”