Think smacking’s a crime? What if it was your wellies I’d filled with water?

IDO wish sometimes that the United Nations would butt out of our private British business, and do something useful for once. One recent intervention into our lives was a report calling for the Government to make smacking illegal – a clarion call that was last week taken up by the four ‘children’s commissioners’ in Britain.

My instinct is that criminalising smacking will cause far more problems than it solves. Why do I say this? Experience.

One wet afternoon, my brother Boris and I snuck into the little porch where all our family’s wellies were lined up and filled every one of them to the brim with water as a Just William jolly jape (we were only five and six at the time, I should perhaps add). Then we hid.

After a while we were rewarded. We heard the creak of the kitchen door opening, then a cry as our prank was discovered.

My mother stormed out into the garden and chased us until we fell to the ground, then she went about us with a stick as we lay laughing in the grass.

The time we filled our boots with water remains one of my most precious and golden childhood memories and I don’t blame my mother in the slightest. Again, no trauma attaches to the occasion a few years later when my brothers were playing with an air rifle belonging to our Italian neighbours in Brussels.

Leo decided as an experiment to swing away from the target and shoot Boris instead in the stomach (to no ill effects – he was cushioned by a layer of fat).

LASTLY, when I was the first girl at an all-boys prep school, I was caught out of bed raiding a tuck cupboard and was given a choice of penalty: it was either a beating by the headmaster (his favoured implements were the slipper, cricket bat, or golf club) or not seeing my parents at the weekend.

I hadn’t seen my parents all term, as was usual back then. I missed them terribly, and without hesitation I opted for the beating.

The headmaster then, to my disappointment, decided that he couldn’t hit a girl; and if he couldn’t beat a girl then it was unfair to beat the boys, too, so I like to think that my choice indirectly led to the end of corporal punishment at the school. (As a result, my name now unfortunately appears on a niche website that lists ‘celebrities’ who enjoy chastisement. It proclaims: ‘Rachel Johnson: she chose the slipper!’) I would like to take this opportunity to confess I have no interest in naughty spanking, but I have smacked, on a few rare and exceptional occasions, my own children.

I’m not proud of it. I like to think I did it because I was failing to be my ‘best self’; plus the whole concept of the ‘naughty step’ hadn’t been invented yet.

I have been both a smackee, and in turn, a light smacker, and I can honestly say that it didn’t do me or my children in turn any harm (they are, of course, free to contradict me).

I’d react like a tigress if anyone else ever once lifted a finger to them or touched so much as a hair on their heads. Hitting other people’s children is illegal, as is smacking your own beyond the bounds of ‘reasonable punishment’ and leaving a red mark. And this, I think, is about right and robust enough. But let’s just scroll back and imagine if smacking was illegal: then, in theory, I would have a criminal record, and so would my mother and father, and my old headmaster.

And God knows what would have happened to the Italian neighbours who gave us a gun to play with unsupervised.

Looking after children is hard work and hairy enough as it is. It’s a miracle that most parents and children come out of it alive, and still adoring each other, as we mostly do.

Loving, non-violent parents can and should be trusted with their own children and their own instincts, without the interference of the international nanny state.

Shoot me now, children’s commissioners, if I’m wrong.