Fiona McCade: What did Mummy say about coalitions?

As A concerned mother, Hermance Clegg likes to be involved with whatever her four children are doing, and to share her opinions with them, writes Fiona McCade

Luckily for her, her third child, Nick, aged 45-and-a-quarter, is the Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain, so he has lots of time on his hands to listen to what his mummy has to say.

Last week, young Nick told an audience of schoolchildren that his mum contacts him every morning with her orders for the day.

“She has learned to e-mail, so she doesn’t leave me a message telling me what to do, she sends me an e-mail,” he announced, proudly. “The instruction always comes through.”

I wonder if the dowager Mrs Cameron does the same, in which case the UK is essentially being run by two ladies in their mid-seventies. If that’s so, maybe we should be told, because it might make around 48 per cent of the population feel happier.

That’s how many of us told a survey about motherhood that they still value and follow their mother’s advice, even now they’re grown into adults, and a hefty 70 per cent of us happily hand down that same maternal counsel to our own kids (although it’s worth noting the 22 per cent who are handing down the advice, but not following it).

Nick Clegg is obviously one of the 48 per cent, but what might his mother be telling him?

Well, I’m not sure what her specific views are on EU fiscal policy and Restructuring Credit Events, but I expect Hermance is regularly passing on tried-and-tested nuggets of good sense to help wee Nicky through the bad times. The same survey that discovered nearly half of us are still doing what our mums tell us also collated a table of the Top 41 Pearls of Motherly Wisdom, and it’s interesting to ponder whether these are the sort of sayings that are keeping our Deputy PM on the straight and narrow.

Top of the chart is “Always try your best”, with “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” coming in at No2.

So far, so wise. But as the none-too-confident mother of a six-year-old, I was getting worried as early as No6 (“Don’t spend money you don’t have”), and by No21 (“Mum knows best”) I was practically calling social services.

How can I brazenly tell my child to do something I clearly don’t do myself? The best I can say is: “It’s a bad idea to spend money you don’t have”, because the moment Junior starts understanding my bank statements, he’ll see that Mummy does dumb stuff like that all the time. Which, in itself, instantly annuls the “Mum knows best” line – should I ever have the blind gall to use it.

I wish I had Mrs Clegg’s absolute certainty about what to tell her boy. I wasn’t even sure about No7, “Never take sweets from strangers”, because it left me thinking, isn’t that a bit too specific to be really useful? What about vegetables, or fruit, or Dickens’s first editions? Is it OK to accept these from strangers?

I obviously haven’t been a mother long enough to get to grips with what really constitutes good advice. In six years, I’ve only managed to impart four pearls of wisdom to my child with any authority. They are:

1) You mustn’t threaten to kill someone just because Love You To is not their favourite track on Revolver.

2) It’s not OK to stroke the legs of the mannequins in John Lewis.

3) Your head won’t explode if you sneeze in space.

4) It’s every child’s solemn duty to look after their parents in their old age if something goes wrong with their pension plan.

In fact, make that…

5) Most children are their parents’ pension plan, especially you, sweetheart.

Given that Nick Clegg ended up in the world of politics, I expect his mum must have told him: “Only do something wrong if you’re clever enough to not get caught”. However, if I were Mrs Clegg, I hope I’d have passed on an even more useful piece of advice, several years ago: “Never accept coalitions from strangers”.