It’s one thing any parent soon learns: when your child loves a book, it won’t be long before you know it almost by heart. Unless, it seems, you are David Cameron.
Asked by a provider of holiday childcare schemes to name his favourite kids’ book, the prime minister opted for The Lorax, the 1971 environmental fable by Dr Seuss.
It was a difficult choice, Cameron writes in a message published on the website of the SuperCamps company, continuing: “Funny, moving, creative and with a powerful message, it’s one I enjoy reading to my children because there always seems to be an image or a message that we have previously missed.”
All very well, except that the subsequent paragraph in which Cameron supposedly describes the plot of the book instead gives a précis of the 2012 film version, which added new characters and detail to pad out the fairly brief original text.
“Set in the walled city of Thneed-Ville, where all nature has gone and even the air is a commodity, a boy named Ted hopes to win the heart of his dream girl, Audrey, by fulfilling her wish to see a real tree,” it reads, chronicling a love interest unknown to Dr Seuss, real name Theodor Seuss Geisel, who died in 1991.
If that wasn’t suspicious enough, Cameron’s submitted text reads in part like a plot summary of the Lorax film provided on the Internet Movie Database website, which begins: “In the walled city of Thneed-Ville, where everything is artificial and even the air is a commodity, a boy named Ted hopes to win the heart of his dream girl, Audrey.”
Given he is an avowedly hands-on parent, it seems unlikely Cameron is so unfamiliar with the book’s plot, in which a young unnamed boy hears how the local environment was devastated by the avaricious, tree-chopping, thneed-knitting Once-ler, despite the protests of the eponymous Lorax, a squat, moustachioed creature who “speaks for the trees”.
Most likely, such a relatively lowly PR task would have been outsourced to an aide, seemingly one who has never read The Lorax 20 times in a row to a child.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said the text was believed to have come from Cameron’s constituency office. SuperCamps confirmed that the text was provided from Cameron’s staff, but had no further immediate comment.
