People in public life must tread carefully when it comes to Christmas cards

WE HAVE a Christmas card from David Cameron. It is not the current one but dates back three years, when he was newly ensconced at Number 10. I’m ashamed to admit that the prime ministerial card sometimes reappears on the mantelpiece, for a joke, which seems to annoy our friends.

It is a lovely picture of David and Samantha with their then fourmonth-old daughter Florence.

This year, their Christmas card depicts the same trio again and it, too, is charming. It deserves its place in their family album, where it belongs.

Where it does not belong is in the homes of countless constituents, colleagues and hangers on of the Prime Minister, or on our mantelpiece. But it is not alone.

Every December we receive several missives of barely recognisable children, the offspring of distant acquaintances, in various stages of growing up.

If we were sent these snapshots at any other time of the year we would be surprised but Christmas has become a kind of amnesty, where the oddest behaviour is indulged.

Some families now zoom their Christmas photos to us electronically.

Last year one mother sent a “smilebox” with a picture of her, her husband and her children (with their destinations in brackets after their names), all smiling.

If I knew the children well I could have followed their progress through school, gap years and university via Facebook, but we are not close.

I look at these photographs with curiosity, much as I would if they were published in a newspaper, but there is rarely any accompanying story to justify them (“baby born in a manger”, for instance, or “virgin gives birth”). Christmas is about families, the photographer families must reason, so what better way to mark it than with images of one’s own nearest and dearest.

But it’s not about them, though the compunction to identify personally with an event as big as Christmas and put oneself, or one’s progeny, in the picture (literally) reflects our culture’s selfobsession.

There are so many, more festive, alternatives to choose from. What’s wrong with shepherds and wise men, or holly and ivy? Or little robins, as someone remarked when they saw Alex Salmond’s card for 2013.

The First Minister went for a startling painting by Peter Howson of the “fourth wise man” dressed in a vest, which he described as hugely appropriate (the subject not the vest) and as it has some vague religious significance we can’t argue with that.

Mr Salmond was a wise man himself not to dispatch his own mug shot to all and sundry.

People in public life must tread carefully when it comes to Christmas cards.

They want to convey a message that offends no one. Neither overtly spiritual nor cynically secular (this is Christmas after all), many conclude that their own families, if they are lucky enough to have them, are the most authentic expression of seasonal goodwill.

Politicians who are normally anxious to protect their relatives’ privacy happily invade it at Christmas if it suits their political ends.

Mr Cameron’s 2008 card, an intimate portrait at home with his wife and children, was said to be an act of defiance after Gordon Brown accused him of using his family as props.

Worse than using your family as a prop, though, is using yourself. Tony and Cherie Blair have posed for power couple pictures for their unsuspecting Christmas card list, as have Charles and Camilla, in tweedy togetherness.

Charles, in fact, has long made a habit of starring in his own season’s greetings, and it would be possible to construct an accurate narrative of his life from his cards (with Diana, with Diana and William, with Diana, William and Harry, with the boys but not Diana, at his wedding to Camilla, with Camilla, and so on).

He picked up this tradition from his mother, who also tends to figure in her own cards, whether in the company of her heirs, her husband, her horses or her corgis.

However, perhaps she alone can be forgiven for this vanity. Santa cards from the Queen would not cut it with the neighbours in quite the same way as a likeness of herself.

Picture: PA Alex Salmond has been wise enough not to dispatch his own mug shot to one and all. Artist Peter Howson watches as the First Minister unveils his 2013 Christmas card.