‘Centrist dad’, a term that has been with us for a decade or so, has never exactly been a compliment. In 2017, even Tony Blair – then still pretty close to being political toxic waste – disavowed the label, declaring: ‘I’m not a centrist dad.’ In that same year a chap named Matt Zarb-Cousin, a spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn – who astonishingly was the leader of the opposition at the time – described centrist dads as ‘middle-aged men who cannot come to terms with the world and politics changing.’ Zarb-Cousin added hubristically: ‘They think they must know better because they are older and wiser.’ (Fortunately the centrist dads did know better, and so did the country, rejecting Corbyn in 2019.)
Still, it was a surprise to see the Telegraph plunging the knife into this group last week. ‘Centrist dads like Rory Stewart were a byword for bland. Now they’re toxic,’ the headline declared. Curiously, the inspiration for the article appears to be a spat between Stewart – the former Conservative cabinet minister and something of a poster boy for centrist dads – and a man called J.D. Vance, who isn’t a sports shoe retailer but in fact the Vice-President of the United States of America. It gets weirder because the spat, which took place over social media, turned on Vance’s interpretation of the words of St Augustine of Hippo. Oh yes, the 5th-century Christian thinker. The Telegraph writer’s conclusion – quoting a few experts for good measure – was that centrist dads such as Stewart and his Rest Is Politics podcast co-host Alastair Campbell are ‘increasingly redundant’ and ‘potentially toxic’.
Parking the precise status of Campbell – the Cardinal Wolsey to Blair’s Henry VIII – I think you can level lots of charges against the country’s centrist dads. But being so out of touch that they’re toxic is not one of them. And we centrist dads understand this only too well, because a defining characteristic of the centrist dad is a certain essential reasonableness. It’s not innate – it’s a reasonableness born in part of being a parent. Any father or mother – biological or not – knows only too well that you don’t need to go on a management course, not once you’ve had children. They are the course.
Children force you to become more tolerant and appreciative of other people’s perspectives, even when those perspectives are totally wrong. If you want to become a more patient version of yourself, one more open to philosophical forbearance, spare yourself the expensive executive retreat or the need to join a monastery 12,000ft up in the mountains of Bhutan. You just need to be a parent for a few years. It is not a God-given virtue; it’s one that is learned slowly and often painfully in the small hours when those without children are sleeping. It’s also not a cause for complacency or arrogance – it’s simply a consequence of the state of sustained caring for little people and providing for them emotionally, financially and physically, as well as their pets and their precious hopes and dreams.
Because behind every centrist dad, with his grey-tinged double chin or paunchy jumper, is somebody who is deeply invested, in their family and in society at large. Like mothers – shall we call them centrist mums? – he is all on the world. With his one-to-three kids, the VW Passat and a tracker mortgage about to lapse to the single variable rate, he has no way of backing out, with or without the parking sensors. He can’t emigrate – he’s likely too old or too poor. Not that he wants to. Any change of job or house move needs to be calculated against a loss of earnings, which would have a direct impact on those creatures he – and that centrist mum – love most in the world.
So when you mock these people and their moderate opinions, you are mocking the individuals who have the greatest personal investment in our society. Because they are raising children here, they fight for the schools their children go to, the hospitals and doctors who care for them; they care about the potholes in the roads not because they want to show off and drive quickly, but because they are hazardous to young and old. The people who are merrily taunted for being ‘out of touch’ with radical politics are in fact the people most emotionally, physically and compassionately in touch with the country.
The people who are merrily taunted for being ‘out of touch’ with radical politics are in fact the people most emotionally, physically and compassionately in touch with the country
Now turn the clock back and consider the men who died at Normandy or in the mud of the first world war. There were the 18- and 19-year-olds, the near-children fresh from school who gave their lives for our freedom – but there were also the centrist dads of yesterday, moderate family men who went off to do their duty even though they were a bit on the old side. But they did it anyway. And many of them never came back, never saw their children grow up.
Centrist dads are moderate for a reason. Because they’ve lived and worked a bit, they have a grasp of human nature and they’ve observed a few political cycles come and go. So they know that politicians struggle to keep their promises and often say things that aren’t quite true to get into power. Many of them can see a demagogue for what he or she is. As a result they are people for whom politics is about pragmatism and keeping the world turning, hopefully for the better. But they are not, on the whole, interested in ideology, rather what works.
The centrist dads’ span of adulthood, something which apparently makes them out of touch, therefore gives them some right to claim knowledge of the world, not least the politicians’ arts of persuasion. This does not give centrist dads the right to pronounce on high, of course, but nor does it disqualify them from having opinions that matter. Because, say it quietly, centrist dads (and mums) are the bedrock of society. In their Golfs, Volvos and vans of different species, they are the unfashionable majority of working men who recognise only too well what’s not and what is working well in society. They are the people that politicians mean when they talk about winning elections ‘from the centre’.
So let’s hear it for the centrist dads – the Rory Stewarts, Ed Daveys and Gareth Southgates of this world. Because it is the centrist dads – and mums – who will be the savours of civilisation once the septuagenarian sociopaths in the White House, Kremlin and Zhongnanhai – the palace where President Xi does his business – have had their way. If there’s anything left, it’ll be up to us lot to pick through the rubble. Then we’ll put the bins out.
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