It's not what you know, but who you know.
Especially if you’re the country’s top legal person. And your best Brexit friend happens to be the Prime Minister, who can pass new legislation in a day which will benefit you.
That’s the good fortune of Suella Braverman, the Attorney-General, for whom the Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Bill was approved by MPs yesterday.
Mrs Braverman will shortly have her second child, but as a Cabinet minister, appointed at the whim of the premier, she wasn’t entitled to maternity leave or pay.
The new law rectifies this anomaly. Mrs Braverman, 40, will enjoy up to six months of leave on full pay.
This is quite generous. She is entitled to a £99,732 Cabinet salary, on top of her £81,932 pay as Conservative MP for the safe seat of Fareham, Hants.
Indeed, very generous compared to the vast majority of women who are entitled to claim six weeks (not months) at 90% (not 100%) of their weekly pay, plus a further 33 weeks at £151 a week.
Why is a successful barrister who chooses to go into politics more special than millions of ordinary mums?
Senior Labour MP Stella Creasy, herself nine weeks’ pregnant, has announced a legal challenge to this discriminatory “two tier” system for mums.
And what about the 80,000 working mothers who gave birth during the pandemic, and lost maternity pay because they were sacked or furloughed? Women like my granddaughter, forced back to work early because her benefit was exhausted.
Boris Johnson promised to “look into” this scandal. He’s done absolutely nothing.
As a father, grandfather and great-grandfather, I wish Mrs Braverman well in her confinement. When she returns to the Cabinet table, I hope she champions the cause of all the other pandemic mums.
They don’t have the ear of the Prime Minister, but they are just as deserving as she is, if not more.
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Eighty-seven million pints of beer have been poured down the drain in the pandemic. Much of what is euphemistically called my waistline went with it. Not so much an old white bear these days as Boney Maroney. Well, not quite...
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Pigs in America (where else?) have been trained to play computer games for food rewards. Ask any farmer: porkers are decent, clever animals who look you in the eye. Unlike City slickers, with their snouts
in the trough.
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