Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Stop the prattle and leave the Browns in peace

Hush now, hush. Go away will you. This is not the time for flashing pictures and eager hacks who have rushed up to Fife to give us all the news that we don't need about the new-born daughter of Gordon and Sarah Brown.

Three days old, and the world is already choosing the child's future nursery – Sea View Independent School in Kirkcaldy, which costs £2,000 per year, according to one irrepressibly excited newspaper – then to Dunfermline High, which has done well in recent league tables, though obviously things may just change a little 12 years from now.

Other speculations are even more ridiculous. According to serious political journalists, this birth is a clear indication that Mr Brown is determined to be the next prime minister (Britain can only have a prime minister, it seems, with a "normal" family profile), which presumably is the only reason he made himself marry, make love to, and impregnate his wife.

I won't bore you with all the rest, the homes and jobs and the lectures on late parenthood that have filled the media. I suppose the intrusive MMR-and-PM story had gone on long enough even for the most tenacious of hounds.

Do these people not understand that Jennifer Jane Brown, battling spirit, still only as big as a small chicken, needs her rightful time to settle into the world into which she so unexpectedly arrived this week? What right do we have to invade this delicate time in the lives of Mr and Mrs Brown?

All those who have endured panics during birth know that a coil of sharp dread wraps itself around the joy and unimaginable love you feel when you see your baby emerging after an acute emergency. Medical advances and the excellent pre-natal and post-natal care provided by the National Health Service have ensured that most British babies live and do well after birth.

But for the parents of such tiny babies, even if they are the power couple of the decade, the ensuing weeks are likely to be full of confusion and intense worry, of involuntary prayer and unexpected humility, as they learn to accept that, for all the progress we have made, life can still be unpredictable and outside their control.

Those of us who are from the Third World carry this uncertainty in our bones. It is hard to forget how fragile our lives once were. Even now 20,000 children die every day, most before they are two, because of a lack of basic necessities and health care. Long after children are born, families refuse to have celebrations because they fear tempting the gods.

My family were shocked when I bought a few items of clothing for my son before he was born. I was forced to return them and wait until after he had arrived and was obviously well enough. Such fatalism, it is often said, holds us back from bold dreams for the future.

There is some truth in this. I cannot make plans beyond a few months (I never had a pension until my English husband came along because I thought it was brazen to believe I would be alive so many years hence), and hand-me-down superstitions shackle my ambitions.

Thank Heaven Gordon Brown is not a man who has ever felt such trembling anxieties about the future of our nation or himself. But after this week, maybe the Chancellor will also become more humble and more vulnerable as he watches his tiny lass go from strength to strength, hopefully away from our prying eyes.

The combination might, indeed, make Mr Brown irresistible to a public that could trust him even more than it does now. As the writer Francis Bacon wrote back in the 17th century: "Those that have children should have greatest care of future times; unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges."

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk