Morning:
8°c
I am beginning to feel a little sorry for our elected servants in Westminster. I know it sounds a little like suggesting that bankers work dreadfully hard and deserve every penny of their bonuses.
Nevertheless, when I learned that Members of Parliament might be banned from employing their spouses, I began to have some sympathy for them.
You see I employ my wife, or at least she has been good enough to take on the burden of running the whole show, issuing invoices, letting me know when I have to pay bills, countersigning cheques and generally carrying out the work that enables us to feed, clothe and educate our children, as well as trying to keep abreast of the ruinous expense of attempting to support a middle-class way of life in the metropolis.
With the children off at school, the scene of domestic bliss is transformed into a humming hive of professionalism, the hub of a global empire with spokes radiating into the Far East and the Americas.
Or to be more accurate, I shuffle into my office at the front of the house with its alluvial deposits of papers and books doing my best to ignore my wife as she calls questions and instructions from her smaller, neater office at the back of the house.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that the woman I married, and with whom I have two sons, is now also a colleague.
And there are times when, stuck in my bunker tapping away at a keyboard so worn that the letters have disappeared, I forget that the person hovering next to me, waiting to ask a question or get a document signed, is not some emotionally remote figure in an office but a person with whom I have shared life's most intimate moments.
It feels strange but it shouldn't. After all, the trite American adjectival construction "Mom and Pop" was coined to define cottage (or in this case, jerry-built 19th-century terraced house) industries like ours.
I am in the workshop and she runs the shop-front; it is really no different from a corner newsagent or a neighbourhood restaurant.
And although it sometimes causes friction - when we exchanged wedding vows I cannot recall her making the solemn promise to chase up outstanding invoices and order office supplies - working together has helped us understand each other better.
So, should we be robbing male MPs of the support of the distaff side of their lives, in their work?
Clearly Sir Christopher Kelly thinks so, and whether one agrees with him or not rather depends on whether you see politics as a family business; after all, MPs' wives campaign for their husbands, are photographed standing by them when they have affairs (with fewer wives at Westminster we might well see more of those) and provide the family with which they will choose "to spend more time" when they are forced to resign from their ministerial posts.
At a prime ministerial or party leadership level spouses are often put to work as part of the PR machinery of public life, providing the charm, poise and how should I put this fragrance that might otherwise be lacking.
Of course it is up to Sir Christopher to decide what is appropriate, but I can only say that speaking from experience my wife, as both spouse and co-worker, is easily the most charming thing about me.
