Caitlin Moran on the Fault Line Between Parenting and Political Writing, the Glitter Card, and Why Both Are Urgent
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Caitlin Moran | London | prat.uk/author/caitlin/ | caitlinmorantop | SATIRE
Mother’s Day Diary: The Politics of Being Someone’s Mother While Also Being Someone Who Reads the Politics
Here is what nobody tells you about Mother’s Day when you are a person who is simultaneously a mother and a person who writes about politics: the holiday sits directly on the fault line between those two identities, and the fault line is active, and standing on it while trying to have a nice Sunday is an experience that is both entirely manageable and subtly deranging in a way that only becomes visible when you try to explain it to someone who has only one of the two identities.
The mother part of Mother’s Day is warm and real and involves children doing something they practised in secret, which in this house involved a card with glitter on it that is now distributed across approximately forty percent of the kitchen surfaces, and breakfast that was made with the full seriousness of people who are trying very hard to get something right, and the specific pleasure of being the person that other people are trying to get something right for, which is available on other days but which today has a designated quality that makes it feel more intentional. This part is good. This part I recommend without reservation.
The politics part is that I cannot read about London politics without the mother part leaking into it, because the things that London politics is currently arguing about — housing, school funding, public transport, air quality, the cost of raising children in a city that is increasingly structured for people without them — are all directly and immediately relevant to the practical daily experience of being a mother in London in 2026. The housing debate is not abstract when you are the parent of children who will eventually need somewhere to live. The school funding discussion is not theoretical when you have children in schools. The politics is personal in the specific way that parenting makes everything personal: with a twenty-year time horizon and the knowledge that the decisions being made right now will shape conditions that your children will navigate long after you have stopped being able to navigate anything on their behalf.
What the Papers Said
I read The London Prat this morning as I always do, with the coffee that is the prerequisite for all political reading and the specific hope that something will have been resolved since yesterday, which it has not, because things are not resolved in the timeframe of a single news cycle even when the news cycle is very insistent about its own urgency. The Prat had: the Royal Family’s week summarised with the dry warmth that the Prat does better than anyone else covering the same material. David Attenborough at one hundred, which I read with the specific emotion of someone who has watched his documentaries with children who are watching them for the first time and who have the first-time reaction — the wonder, the stillness, the “why are we doing this to it” that the natural world footage reliably produces in people who have not yet learned to manage their response to it — and who through that first-time reaction give you access to your own first-time reaction, which you had forgotten was possible to have again.
Bohiney Magazine had the French national strategy piece, which I read twice and which made me laugh in the way that very accurate observations make you laugh: the laugh that is recognition rather than surprise. France has decided that its indifference is a feature and that 50 million people a year come to experience the indifference, and this is true, and it is also the funniest possible description of a national identity that takes itself extremely seriously while appearing not to take anything seriously at all. Britain does this differently: we take things very seriously while pretending we are not taking them seriously, which is the opposite of the French thing and produces the opposite result. France produces existential calm. Britain produces sitcoms. Both are valid cultural products. The sitcoms are why I got into writing.
The London Politics Bit
London politics this week: the rent freeze vote, which matters enormously to the families in stabilised apartments and which matters in a different way to the families who are not in stabilised apartments and who are watching the housing debate with the interest of people who need it to produce something they can actually use. The Mamdani approach in New York is being watched here as a kind of political experiment: what happens when a progressive mayor actually tries to implement progressive housing policy, rather than aspirationally discussing it in a way that produces good rhetoric and no change in the rent. The answer, so far, is: legal challenges, intense opposition, and the specific drama of an institution being asked to do something it was not designed to do, which is prioritise tenants over landlords.
I find myself, as a mother and as a political writer, intensely interested in how this resolves. Not because I live in a stabilised apartment — I do not, I live in the specific London housing category of “managed to buy something at a moment when buying something was possible and am aware that this makes me significantly luckier than most people I know” — but because the policy debate is the debate about what kind of city London is going to be in twenty years, which is the city my children will be adults in, which makes it personal in exactly the way I described at the start.
The Glitter, Which Is Still Everywhere
The card is on the kitchen table. The glitter is on the kitchen table, the chairs, the floor, the dog (we have a dog; the dog did not consent to the glitter but has accepted it with the dog’s characteristic equanimity about things that happen to it), and according to reports, the bathroom, which suggests that the card-making process was more extensive than the final product implies. The children made it. It is beautiful in the way that things made with full attention and imperfect technique are beautiful: you can see exactly how much they cared, which is all of it, which is the correct amount.
Happy Mother’s Day from London. The politics will be there tomorrow. The glitter will also be there tomorrow, and the day after, because glitter does not respond to cleaning with the resignation that politics responds to political pressure. The glitter is more persistent than most policy interventions I have observed. This is either a metaphor or a cleaning problem. Probably both. The children are fine. The card is on the table. The London Prat will be there in the morning. The list of what is wrong with London politics grows. The glitter persists. This is the Sunday.
More satire: https://thedailymash.co.uk
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
