Tony Blair listens to local residents at the Toothill community centre in Swindon during the launch of his new Respect campaign. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
It's not the first time Tony Blair has admitted he smacked his kids, a fact a consummate professional like Kirsty Wark was unlikely to have forgotten. Back in 1996, the Labour leader gave an interview to Parents magazine in which he admitted he had occasionally smacked his children for naughtiness or nastiness to other children. "There is a clear dividing line between administering discipline on the one hand and violence on the other, which most parents understand perfectly well", he said at the time.
Now a veteran prime minister, he was just as shrewd when he fielded a question about his parenting style in an interview with Newsnight last night.
Mr Blair, who routinely and fiercely defends his right to privacy where his family is concerned – to the point that you can't even ask him if his youngest Leo received an MMR jab - was quite happy to repeat that his three older children were once subject to the occasional slap.
This expediency served to highlight that it's different with Leo. Pops has matured and no longer resorts to physical chastisement.
The point of Mr Blair's admission could be seen as an attempt to reassure the public that the Respect agenda isn't really for middle class parents who may err once in a while, but for everyone else, those "difficult families" some people are unlucky enough to have in their neighbourhood. "I think the problem is when you get these really, really difficult families, it's moved a bit beyond that," he said last night.
Many children's campaigners don't see it that way. They believe parents shouldn't have flexibility of hitting their children when all else fails. Children's charities lobbied furiously to criminalise the hitting of children outright, whatever the degree of force - a move the prime minister refused to entertain as part of the Children's Act 2004.
Frankly, he just wasn't prepared to condemn most of the parenting population, since parents who have fully abstained from slapping their little people appear to be few and far between. Unlike violence, respect is not a continuum. Mr Blair would have been better off using yesterday's airtime to make the point that his respect agenda should apply to everyone of us, not just the "really really difficult" individuals within society. It was a missed opportunity for self-reflection.
