I sat down with the prime minister recently at Downing Street to ask questions posed by users of Mumsnet, the website I founded. It was his denial of “habitual lying” that garnered the headlines, but I was more struck by his answer to a question on subsidising childcare – one of the most crucial issues for mothers. Boris Johnson seemed to think that enabling parents to spend their state-funded childcare allowance on Tumble Tots classes or similar will solve the childcare crisis.
“There are things that you and I might remember from our days in north London,” he said to me. “You know, things like Tumble Tots or Danceround or Little Kickers or whatever these things are that you can do, that currently you can’t use childcare funding for, but maybe you should be able to do in the future.”
