(Full disclosure. I have watched two dear friends stranded in the no-woman’s land of a long affair, both scarred for life, both childless. If I ever see a third sign on for the same deal, I swear I will kidnap her and not let her go until she is cured of both low expectations and grand illusions.)
In the moral climate of 30 years ago, Parkinson had to resign because of sex. His position was considered untenable due to his adultery and the embarrassment of his secretary being openly with-child. What the court of public opinion judges him for today is quite different. Now, it is Parkinson’s failure to be a father to his daughter with Keays that brings in a guilty verdict.
It wasn’t just that Parkinson refused to ever see Flora, his so-called “love child”, though that omission caused her great pain. It was that he sought a legal injunction so draconian that Flora, who suffers from learning difficulties, was not able to appear in her own school photographs or take part in school shows. To protect her privacy (and, not coincidentally, that of the man who had sired her), Flora Keays was subject to the same type of injunction that hid the identity of the child killer Mary Bell. To a chilling degree, Cecil Parkinson’s fourth daughter did not exist.
Throughout history, powerful, rakish men scattering illegitimate children like wild oats in a ploughed field has been a given. French presidents and Hugh Grant still do it, though we tend to find it weird and slightly sad for the women concerned. What has changed dramatically over the past three decades, with more women entering the workplace, is the notion of parenting as a shared activity. When men of my father’s generation got home from work, they were expected, at most, to read a bedtime story or to kiss a sleepy head. The daddy of today gets in the front door, only to find himself immersed in bath-time and picking up the baton in the domestic relay race from mummy, who is running out for her Pilates class. So great is the contribution of Millennial Dads that the Modern Families Index just revealed that fathers are “burning out” as much as mothers.
Welcome to our world, chaps. Himself once cried out in anguish that he had spent more of his life at Zoomaround, our local soft play centre, sitting in a plastic pond of orange balls, than in the National Gallery. I felt his pain, I did, but really I was glad he now got to share mine.
If younger fathers have traded golf clubs for carrot batons then it’s their offspring who benefit from the upswing. Recently, the “most shared” article on the Telegraph website was about a study which proved that children whose fathers spent more time with them had a higher IQ and were more socially mobile. Researchers reported in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour that it was not enough for parents to live together, but that a father should be actively involved in a child’s life to benefit their development.
"The daddy of today gets in the front door, only to find himself immersed in bath-time"
The sadness of the Cecil Parkinson story is that he was a prisoner of his time – a time that is thankfully drawing to a close. What ruined his reputation was not that he was too much of a shagger, but too little of a father.
Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/579309/s/4d257fe8/sc/13/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cnews0Cpolitics0C121235590CWhy0ECecil0EParkinson0Ewas0Ea0Eprisoner0Eof0Ehis0Etime0Bhtml/story01.htm