Boris Johnsons baby news: his transition from politician to celebrity is over | Zoe Williams | Opinion

WWhen Cherie Blair got pregnant on Downing Street, to create the first baby born to an outgoing Prime Minister since the 1840s, the general response was a dull surprise and respectful congratulations. No one was anti-baby. At the same time, a Prime Minister was a civil servant, not the head of a dynasty or a character from a soap opera; we were about to make baby Leo a commemorative plaque. We were, on the whole, resolutely neutral towards this baby, neither for nor against him.

Compare the next bundle of joy from Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds: Supporting journals bill this event somewhere between a royal baby and a second coming. The front cover of the Sunday Telegraph looks like Hello! magazine, the large radiant face of Symonds, carefully tilted, so that Johnson, kissing him in profile, looks like nothing more than usual. No wedding 10 and a baby too! the title croons, as if these two comforting facts were absolutely unrelated. A radio host tweets, good news much needed for the country, and a nation is scratching its head and rubbing its eyes: how is it supposed to be for the country? Does the Prime Minister not have children constantly?

But all the personal criticism is quite shy. I don't care if Johnson is on his third marriage, or that his fiancée is 24 years younger than him. I don't care if he doesn't get married. This mind-boggling moralizer, the Prime Minister who has happily wiped a few bobts from lashing single mothers, challenges us with his family pantomime happy to use these moral arguments against him, and who knows, maybe that they would be effective. But I do not believe in maintaining order in people's personal lives. The Conservatives are incredibly good at borrowing principles that they do not want to score. (Topical example: Having had no interest in equality in the past six decades, they are suddenly the most intrepid crusaders against sexism and racism when defending Priti Patel.) The left, generally, is bad in this area, and should be proud of it.

I'm also not crazy about the argument that the baby is a distraction, that news of his upcoming arrival is being broadcast to distract us at a difficult time for government, when crises are everywhere, only about the half of them of its own making. Maybe Johnson is so cynical, maybe he's looking to maximize the welfare or dead cat potential of his offspring; Maybe they will release a sprog at the right time every two years until all of the disasters have passed, by which time no one will be able to count the children of the Prime Ministers.

However, when you try to guess a politician who uses his personal life for a calculated effect, you are drawn into a cynical feedback loop. You start by questioning his motivations for buying a dog: very quickly, you distrust the dog (he is cute on purpose, because he knows that another permanent secretary is about to leave). It's a win-win for Johnson, either we take his news for real and we welcome it, or we look at it for intent to manipulate, becoming ourselves cynical in the process, normalizing a culture of distrust. I would prefer to knit a little hat.

Yet there is reason to back off from the new policy. The Prime Minister, present in Technicolor for this personal news, is absent as a politician: invisible in the flooded areas; extremely late and so far absurd on the issue of coronaviruses. He was so absent for nine days last month, locked in the country’s retreat of foreign ministers, that wild rumors began to circulate about what he was doing (the strangest being that he was writing another novel). Maybe his supporters will use his baby announcement as a reason for that ah, everything is starting to make sense, he was decorating the nursery but that too is extremely unusual, not only in politics but in any what a job, to take nine days of paternity leave even before the birth of the child.

His behavior, and the way he asks us to treat him, is not as a politician or, in fact, as a professional, but as a television celebrity. It would be absolutely typical for a Kardashian to say nothing substantial and to keep all transparency for personal ads on Instagram and favorable media; it would be typical of a Trump or any other showbiz politician. There is an implicit servility, there is nothing reciprocal in this relationship, ours is not to question but to see. Unlike a royal baby, there is no pump, just a cheerful built atmosphere (they are celebrities, after all, not members of the royal family). It is disturbing, beyond anything else and it is this television glare, rather than any baby, which is unprecedented in an outgoing Prime Minister.

Zoe Williams is Guardian columnist