Ms Dati is asking for it this time. She really is!
Any other woman would be having, at the very least, a bad hair day. But not Rachida Dati, France’s impossibly glamorous Justice Minister, and the first ever Muslim woman to be appointed such a lofty role.
She still looks as if she’s sashayed out of a Vogue centre spread – even though she’s a single mother who was sensationally sacked by the Prime Minister just days after giving birth by Caesarean section, been the subject of France‘s vicious gossip industry about her naked ambition and her refusal to name the father of her child, and now held responsible for the country’s biggest ever prison strike. Prison guards, who are striking even though their action is illegal, say she’s “flounced around in Dior dresses rather than visited the country’s fetid prisons”, which have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Now Rachida’s four-month-old daughter , has been rushed to hospital suffering from an unknown illness.
But Ms Dati was not by her baby’s side, holding her little hand and cooing reassuringly into her tiny ear, and pestering the doctors and nurses about her care, as most mothers would do. She jetted off to Jordan to meet the Queen Rania to discuss “ means of boosting judicial and legal cooperation between Jordan and France”, leaving her sick baby in hospital a thousand miles away and in the care of God knows who.
I know it is perverse that there are no harsher critics of single, working mothers, than other women themselves. We all fight our own personal battles, and have to juggle almost impossible demands in our own way, finding our own solutions. Which is why I have fought really hard to pull back from automatically criticising the infamous Ms Dati. But this sorry
behaviour leaves me, and every working mother I know, absolutely appalled. It’s dereliction of motherly duty. I can’t help wondering if the rumour machine might be right. Because Ms Dati seems to have a much, much stronger sense of ambition and self-promotion than maternal instinct. Which makes me wonder why she bothered to have a baby in the first place. If it was for love – then this is a strange way to show it.
The child fell ill while Mum was away for the weekend at a society wedding. After being rushed to hospital, Ms Dati joined her daughter, spent a few hours there, and then decided to get on with her hectic schedule – even though it meant a foreign trip meaning days away while her child was still ill, undiagnosed and therefore, presumably, unstable, or at least with an uncertain prognosis.
And, most of all, so little – just four months old. At that age, so vulnerable, so fragile, a child needs its mother – even if it won’t remember the experience.
In my experience, a mother also has a raw, instinctive and almost primal need to be with her young – to will it to fight, to ensure that everyone else is fighting for its survival.
It takes a cold heart to simply leave it to the professionals. And funnily enough, one of my best friends is a friend of Queen Rania of Jordan. She’s a glamorous mother herself, and yet my mate assures me she’s the type who would cancel a state visit if one of her own brood were ill – especially if it was an undiagnosed illness in hospital. I doubt it crossed
Ms Dati’s mind to ask for a postponement – because she’s only a got a few days left in the job. And therein lies the moral of the story.
Ms Dati, whose career is about as dodgy as Gordon Brown’s at the moment wanted to go out in style. Meeting the Queen of Jordan was her Obama moment – one on which she hopes to pin her political survival. And when you’re a single mother, it’s vital to have a job.
So why don’t I feel empathy and understanding for Rachida Dati, jetting off on her diplomatic mission while her child lies lonely in a Paris hospital? Because it’s just plain wrong for a mother not to be with her child at such a time. If you are going to be a mother (and she’d surely have had a termination if she didn’t want a child), your baby must be your absolute priority – and for a child to grow up feeling loved and happy, it needs to
see mum or dad demonstrate that regularly. It’s not enough to justify your absence by saying that your job was more important. We all juggle like crazy – the trick is you never, ever, take your eye off the key ball in the air – your child.
What’s more, we had a right to expect more from Rachida Dati the politician. She could have been a breath of fresh air for young working single mothers everywhere. She could have stood tall in her six inch stilettos and proclaimed: “I’ll put my child first and still prove I am good at my job!”
She has however proved the opposite – that she has fallen at the first real test. She’ll probably be mystified at the clamour of criticism coming her way from mothers all over the world.
Perhaps Ms Dati is tough and ruthless – she certainly has had to be. She comes from a family of 11 brtohers and sisters, born to poor North African immigrants. To escape her humble origins, she took menial jobs to work her way through law school. She married in her twenties “to please her family” but she immediately regretted it and persuaded her young husband to have an annulment. Two decades later, she became a firm favourite of President Sarkozy, who promoted her well beyond her abilities – or so the critics say. Now she’s fallen foul of the new First Lady. Carla Bruni doesn’t like her – and is said to have engineered her fall. Politics is rough. So is motherhood – especially single motherhood. It involves lots of difficult decisions, tough calls. I often envy my married friends who can share the load. There have been so many times when I have had to take the day off work because of a sick child – and bear the consequences. My agent regularly pulls his hair out over the fact that, for many years, I have never been able to work at weekends. I can’t host radio drive time shows because I absolutely must be home to help with homework – I can’t whizz off to film Holiday programmes because I can’t leave my boys to fend for themselves. I just recently had to turn down an exciting new theatrical production because it would have meant weeks away from home and even the best of child care doesn’t make up for Mum being absent while you’re revising for your GCSEs. For all Ms Dati’s glamour, bravura and panache, she doesn’t seem to have much motherly warmth, though she does seem to exude political bravado. In a recent book, “Mascara and Tears” her biographer described one of Ms
Dati’s “best little coups” when she turned up at the Elysee palace unannounced – “to avoid being brushed off” – carrying her newborn baby. Presenting the baby to the president, she asked him to be godfather, to which he could not say no. Inevitably, French women are now wondering if the baby is no more than a designer accessory – now with enduring connections! I think that is too harsh. Single mums, especially ambitious ones, are too easy a target for bitchiness. Except that Ms Dati is asking for it this time. She really is! This article first appeared in the Daily Mail |
