Boris Johnson's dad thinks being pro-Brexit is 'career-ending' and Cameron's mum opposes cuts - what next?

The Tories are supposed to be all about family, but as their own party faces big divisions, family involvement seems ill-advised at best

Boris Johnson announced that he will be ‘advocating vote leave ... because I want a better deal’ (EPA)

Fears that Boris Johnson is just an overgrown baby who has been let loose in London by some terrible admin mistake has been compounded now that his father has come out to defend his behaviour like a stubborn dad at parents’ evening.

Stanley Johnson appeared on the BBC's Today programme yesterday, after his son’s decision to back the Brexit campaign for Britain to leave the European Union.

Daddy Boris said his son had done his homework, and his “well-thought-out move” represented “his deep conviction that at this moment this is what he needed to do”.

There is quite a consensus that hopeful Prime Minister Boris has one eye on Downing Street with every move he makes. But now his father insists that his decision was not motivated by an ambition to get a good cabinet position after the London mayoral elections in May, or his longer-term ambitions to become PM.

“Honestly, I think to say this is a careerist sort of move would be a total travesty. I cannot think of any more career-ending move than to do what he did yesterday, in the sense that he is leaving the mayoralty in May. If he wanted to get a nice job in the cabinet on May 8 this is not the way to do it,” he said.

But Johnson Senior’s remarks are as transparent as George Osborne’s skin. He wants to convince us professional opportunist Boris had no ulterior motives, and in insisting that, has only stirred our suspicions.

But Boris isn’t the only politician to have mixed family with politics. The Conservatives are all about the family, after all, with their tax cuts for married families and obsession with home-ownership.

But in Tory politics, it seems to go a bit wrong when family gets involved.

Cameron recently wrote a strongly worded letter to a council planning to close all of its 44 children’s centres, asking them to reconsider. The council then politely reminded Cameron that he was the one who had imposed devastating cuts to councils across the country.

And then it emerged that the PM’s own mother signed a petition against the council’s planned cuts, and her own son’s austerity measures.

Not to leave Labour out, let’s remember that former leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband was cursed from the start when he beat his brother to the post in 2010. Five years later, as Ed battled for the role of Prime Minister, journalists drooled as they asked him on live TV how irrevocably damaged his family was now and the Daily Mail famously asked if his father was “the man who hated Britain”.

The logic goes that a politician’s family getting involved in their careers has got to be a good thing, in the sense that it helps them come across a tiny bit more human.

But for PR machine Cameron and PM-hopeful Boris (whatever his dad says), it would seem family is best left out of politics. And that means giving the rest of us unmarried rabble a tax break too, Cameron - or no doubt your mother will be getting some more petitions sent her way.