{"id":6626,"date":"2019-05-27T11:54:29","date_gmt":"2019-05-27T11:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=6626"},"modified":"2019-05-27T11:54:30","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T11:54:30","slug":"we-need-nanny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=6626","title":{"rendered":"We Need Nanny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Margaret Rutherford\/Femmes fatales weblog<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We are always being told that the nanny state is a bad\nthing: Tories have been banging on about it forever, and New Labour had a jolly\ngood go at ditching Nanny. But why, when it\u2019s Nanny\u2019s job to keep you well fed,\nwell clothed and usefully occupied? What\u2019s more, she\u2019ll make sure you behave\nnicely and don\u2019t get into fights with other children, and she certainly won\u2019t\nlet you embarrass yourself and others by unseemly displays of temper and\nimmoderate language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider the monumental hypocrisy of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who would have us break with Europe and go it alone, trailing some tawdry and ineffectual sovereignty into the badlands where Nanny cannot reach us. Yet this is a man who has not yet left the care of his own nanny \u2013 a woman who, by his own admission, keeps his show on the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nanny would have had no truck with the wicked lies put about by the arch-Brexiteers, or with the folly of enacting Article 50 before you have a sensible plan. She would have waded in and knocked heads together \u2013 figuratively speaking, in these post-\u2018reasonable defence\u2019 days. And she certainly wouldn\u2019t let these naughty boys and girls have a brand new \u00a31.5bn nursery built in Richmond House while the Houses of Parliament are restored. No \u2013 she would make sure they pulled their socks up and went to work in Scunthorpe or Skelmersale for a few years, where they could share some of the discomforts of their less fortunate compatriots and reflect on what they could do to eliminate these. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s obvious that what we need right now is not so much a deus ex machina<\/em> as a nanny from Norland. \u2018The country is crying out for some stability right now,\u2019 declared Laura Kuenssberg last week \u2013 too right! Stability is precisely what Nanny provides, which perhaps explains why I have such a soft spot for a couple of dictators who provided just that, apparently without lining their own pockets and while exercising a degree of repression dwarfed by the excesses of their more monstrous counterparts: Lee Kuan Yew and Fidel Castro. (I have long hankered for the firm smack of LKY\u2019s zero-tolerance approach to rubbish in my own fly-tipped street.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all need Nanny because the flesh is weak. It’s hard to be good on your own. It’s hard to curtail the number of flights you take, redistribute any surplus wealth you might have, and run after the litter you have allowed to blow away with only your own self-discipline to keep you on the straight and narrow. But how much easier it becomes if Nanny is making you and everyone else do it \u2013 you just fall into line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So who is Nanny? I see her as a devastating combination of\nthe comfortable wisdom and down-to-earth common sense of Dandy Nicholls with\nthe cool authority of Gillian Anderson. Would you dare to defy such a woman?\n(At this point, let me just clarify that Thatcher, despite resonating as a\nnanny-figure in the fantasies of many of her MPs, was not <\/em>Nanny. Nanny cares about all<\/em>\nher charges.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inevitably, I leave you with the moral of Hilaire Belloc\u2019s\ncautionary tale about the unfortunate Jim, who was eaten by a lion:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why should these naughty boys and girls have a new \u00a31.5bn nursery in Richmond House?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,55,65,56,54],"tags":[207,209,208],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6626"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6626"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6640,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6626\/revisions\/6640"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}