Ted Cruz seems determined to blame his children for his failings – he wouldn’t be the first politician to do so

Cruz’s children wanted to go to Cancun, and it had therefore been up to their dad to drop them off. What choice did he have?

Senator Ted Cruz’s arguably poor decision to head off for some winter sunshine in Mexico, while his voters literally froze to death on the pavements is surprising, but not necessarily shocking. This is just the sort of thing that politicians do.

The charges he has generated against himself through that abortive journey in the court of public opinion are many and varied, but there is arguably one that will take a little longer to work through than the others.

That one, the most serious one, is to lay the blame for his own towering shortcomings upon his young children.

The right-thinking world, which is having a bit of a comeback at present, already has a fairly low opinion of the guy. His speech on the United States Senate floor in defence of the insurrectionist mob that had gathered outside set new terms for the limits of what George Orwell called “political language”, which is better known as either sophistry, or its more user-friendly alternative – outright lying.

Whether we are even shocked by this new level of shamelessness therefore seems unlikely. Anyone who’s prepared to sod off to the sunbeds while his people endure long days and nights of total power outages and sub-zero temperatures is prepared, pretty much, to do anything. And that very much includes blaming his daughters.

It was, the world quickly learnt, their fault. They had wanted to go to Cancun, and it had therefore been up to their dad to drop them off. What choice did he have? It’s what parents do, isn’t it? Who of us can say we’ve never emitted a weary sigh, possibly accompanied by the word “fine”, and booked a stack of plane tickets to chaperone the kids down to Mexico and then, when the media gets wind of it, come back the next day on a different flight?

The most tragic aspect of all is that Cruz joins a depressingly long list of politicians to deploy their own children as a public relations human shield.

In 1952, a then rather young Richard Nixon was running for vice president. To face down allegations of corruption over possible favours done for him by wealthy backers, he gave a televised speech about his own humble background, and how the only gift he’d ever received that he hadn’t declared or returned was his daughters’ beloved dog, Checkers.

Apparently it felt shameless at the time, but higher bars would be set later. (It’s never the crime, it’s always the cover-up, goes a now popular saying that harks back to Watergate, though it can of course be both.)

The Paris hotel room that came to be the downfall of Jonathan Aitken only came to be his downfall once it could be proven that neither his wife nor his daughter could possibly have slept in it, as he claimed. But said downfall only occurred long after he had dragged them both into the misery of it all.

In 2002, when Tony and Cherie Blair found themselves in some very serious bother over two luxury Bristol flats they had purchased with the help of a convicted fraudster, their first response was to issue what turned out to be complete fabrications to The Mail on Sunday. When said fabrications fell apart, the next line forthcoming was a teary statement about trying only, “to protect my family’s privacy, and particularly my son in his first term at university, living away from home”.

This was, we learned, “the instinct, which I think any mother would have”. Instinct is indeed the right word, but it’s the survival one, not the maternal.

All of which brings us lovingly on to Dominic Cummings, and the 500-mile round trip to Durham, which fatally undermined the case for lockdown, demolished the credibility of the entire cabinet, yet kept him in his job for a few very short months more.

It’s hardly worth picking over the pieces of all that again now, other than to gently remind that the childcare that was so urgently required was never, in the end, actually taken up. And the urgency of it was also somewhat undermined when he would claim, seconds later, that he also liked to test his eyesight by popping said child in the back of his Land Rover and taking a day trip to Barnard Castle.

The children, of course, never get a say in all this, though their fortunes do vary. George Bush Sr did very little, if anything at all, to humiliate his son, also called George, though he very much took the opportunity to do that himself, when he inherited his father’s old job 12 years later.

And brave would be he who bet too large a sum on a junior member of the Trump dynasty failing to do the same.