THE CHILDCARE FIGHT GOES ON

Inside her tour triumph

Had he not resigned in a blaze of shame, 24 July would have marked Boris Johnson’s third anniversary as PM. In that time there have been an unprecedented four Education Secretaries: Gavin Williamson, Nadhim Zahawi, Michelle Donelan (who quit after just 48 hours) and James Cleverly. Johnson claimed his party will continue ‘cutting burdens’ on families, but with Westminster in turmoil, will our fight for affordable childcare slip even further off this Government’s radar?

Last spring, Grazia and its parenting platform The Juggle launched our Childcare Change Now campaign with the charity Pregnant Then Screwed (PTS). We called for a Government-led independent review of the cost and availability of UK childcare – the second most expensive globally. In response, on this year’s International Women’s Day, no less, the Government said it wouldn’t be conducting a formal review, despite our petition gaining more than 113,000 signatures.

On 4 July, Grazia spoke to Nadhim Zahawi, then still Education Secretary, after the Government announced new plans to cut the cost of childcare. These included making childminding easier to offer (‘We want to help with things like… them not getting inspected by Ofsted every five minutes,’ he told us), driving awareness of schemes such as Tax-free Childcare, and relaxing staff-child ratios. The plans were called ‘woefully inadequate’ by campaigners. A recent study found 43% of mothers are considering leaving their jobs due to the cost of childcare, and on 8 July a PTS survey found 60.5% of women say the cost of childcare influenced their decision to have an abortion.

With the Government now in disarray we must fight harder than ever to make leaders take action on our calls for childcare change. Follow @thejuggleuk

OCEANS RISE, empires fall, but Adele will always have us at Hello. On a balmy Friday night at Hyde Park’s British Summer Time festival, the Queen of British pop brought 65,000 adoring babes, luvs and huns to a heady state of raw bliss: a mood best described as unfiltered Adele-ation. The following night, she did it all again.

‘My god, I’m home,’ she said as she opened her two-hour show, hair swept into an elegant updo and wearing a floor-length Schiaparelli gown. ‘It’s so strange to be in front of a crowd again. I get so nervous before each show but I love being up here.’

Some had waited seven hours to bag the best spots. The 34-year-old wheeled out every showstopper, sipped tea, nattered with the crowd, cooed over babies in the audience, complained about a bad back, paused to point out practical little black anti-slip socks she wore under her couture ball gown and unleashed a contraption that fired signed T-shirts and £50 notes into the ecstatic masses.

This was the first time the La-based émigré has played in the UK since 2016. Five years have passed since her last public concert. She has cancelled high-profile dates (Wembley Stadium, 2017, due to vocal cord injury) or postponed them (her Vegas residency, early 2022). Last November came 30, her first album in six years, an unsparing biographical ode to the amicable-but-still-painful end of a relationship you’ve grown out of.

So it gave us warm, fuzzy feels to see Adele’s ex-husband Simon Konecki, a charity entrepreneur, happily sitting alongside their son Angelo, nine, and Adele’s new squeeze, the sports agent Rich Paul. ‘It took a lot for Adele to introduce Rich to Simon and she only did it once they were exclusive and she was ready for him to meet Angelo,’ an LA source tells us. ‘The guys got on right away, Simon can see Rich as a sincere and grounded character with no real edge to him at all and [Rich] is honoured he’s been trusted and welcomed into their circle. They meet quite often for dinners or coffee at Adele’s, there’s zero awkwardness whatsoever and Adele’s thrilled they’re now branching out and socialising in public with other friends. The future’s very positive and everyone’s committed to keeping this positive momentum going.’

Adele has made a fortune estimated at £150m in the last Sunday Times’ Rich List and has an LA lifestyle that sees her rub shoulders with good friend Beyoncé. But if there’s one thing Adele has always been, it’s relatable. ‘Adele and Simon have always put Angelo at the very top of their priority list, no matter how difficult or strained things were between them. When they first split he originally moved into a place right opposite hers in LA so they could co-parent as often as possible, and it worked especially well when one of them needed to travel on business or head back to the UK for a spell,’ says our source. ‘The choice was simple: put their egos aside and establish clear boundaries with mutual respect or dig in and suffer. As loving parents as well as pragmatists, it was a no-brainer.’

Her secret weapon was Untamed, a book by the self-help author Glennon Doyle that Adele described as ‘literally life-changing… Probloodyfound’ in 2020. In it, Doyle writes of how she left her own marriage: ‘I burned the memo insisting that the way a family avoids brokenness is to keep its structure by any means necessary… I decided that a family’s wholeness or brokenness has little to do with its structure. A broken family is a family in which any member must break herself into pieces to fit in. A whole family is any family… in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free.’

‘For a woman in the business, she’s inspirational,’ Adele’s booker, Lucy Dickins, told the Financial Times last month. For women everywhere, we’d say the same.