Madeleine
I was born in 1983 and, after some debate between my parents, I was not named Margaret as Dad would have liked — he was a big fan of Thatcher. He was a barrister, worked incredibly hard and was absent a lot.
I don’t think he’ll mind me saying my mum did most of the work at home. His parenting style was liberal and extremely laissez-faire. My siblings and I almost never got told off and he put no pressure on any of us to do things he thought were wholesome. We were left to make our own decisions. Other parents, I discovered with horror, went through their children’s school reports; we weren’t even sure if he’d read ours. Dad believed parents shouldn’t mould their children. We had no rules or curfew, so we briefly became nocturnal as teenagers. He never gave unsolicited advice, I had to extract it from him.
We are both analytical and not very emotional, and we don’t have an emotional relationship. The difference between us is that I make an effort to blend in and he does not. I have to remind myself to behave like other human beings and add niceties to emails, but it doesn’t come naturally. Dad doesn’t do the niceties. I lived in the US for a while and, after about six weeks of no contact from me, I got a message from him. The subject line said: “Are you still alive?” and the text was: “A neutral inquiry.” We are close — I while away most Sunday afternoons at my parents’ house in London, but there is no obligation.
Dad’s secret is that he’s shy. We are both shy people who ended up spending a surprising amount of time on TV. He has no small talk at all but get him on topic — on the law, Trump, democracy or history — and he will engage with anyone, whether it’s a politician at a dinner party or a five-year-old child. With either, his approach would be more or less the same: he is neither deferential nor patronising. When I was six he gave me a detailed explanation of how inflation works, which I still remember. We didn’t know he was an unusual person to have as a father, we thought he was normal.
I was a nerdy child who loved school. I studied Russian and French at the University of Oxford, so watching him defend Roman Abramovich [in a lawsuit brought by fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky, for which Sumption received a fee of almost £8 million — the highest in British legal history] gave me a fascinating insight into contemporary Russian politics.
Dad is comfortable making strong prescriptions about how the world should be. I really believe in impartiality and in my role as director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, which looks at the impact of migration policies, I have to remain neutral. That comes naturally because I see problems everywhere. Very few policies are objectively a good idea. Dad is kind enough not to opine too vociferously on immigration, though there have been moments of overlap. We were once on Newsnight at the same time — I was talking about the impact of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda and he was talking about the legal and constitutional issues. Neither of us get into fiery arguments: our disagreements are usually about how strong the evidence is. His years as a barrister trained him to make a persuasive case and my time at the Migration Observatory has trained me to show why the evidence is more complicated than people think.
Dad has far more stamina than I do. He wrote a five-volume history of the Hundred Years’ War in his spare time and he can drink the whole family under the table. He has an extraordinary ability to screen out the noise of my two kids and the destruction of his environment while reading his book — and he has never said a word about my parenting style, despite the chaos.
Jonathan
Clever children are likely to be better brought up by themselves than by their parents. You provide a safe and loving environment then let them get on with it. Of course you have to be available, but if they’re good at bringing themselves up, they won’t want you that often.
Take learning to drive. The law says you have to be in the car, and I was with each of my children. Sometimes they may have come too close to the car in front, but I wouldn’t notice unless they told me because I was reading my newspaper. I think they found this fine.
Of our three, Madeleine is the child who is most like me. She is an articulate arguer of positions without betraying a political position or being emotional about it. Emotions do get in the way of logical argument. She’s essentially an economist: economists rely on assumptions about human behaviour that are false when applied to any one person, but true when applied to the average. There’s an intellectual beauty about it that both of us feel very deeply.
Madeleine, from quite a small child, was independent and articulate and she knew what she wanted to do. She made all her own decisions about schools: at eight, she told us she was going to her older brother’s boarding school in Sussex and she chose every school after that.
Worrying about your children is a modern disease. Quite unnecessary. Parents have a strong desire to be important in their children’s lives and they do it for their own emotional comfort. It can be quite destructive. They should be as important in their children’s lives as their children want them to be.
I was better with teenagers than toddlers because I could talk to them. We didn’t have a TV — my objection was that it was a purely passive form of entertainment — so the children read and played and they went round to friends. If they were interested in something, one encouraged it. But I didn’t have expectations. If you are incredibly keen on them achieving something and they don’t, the silence is so much more humiliating.
My children were the last generation to be teenagers before the internet. Relaxed parenting is far more difficult today. Had they been bombarded with rubbish and malevolence on social media, I might have changed my approach and been far more involved. I’ve always been very pleased with my children’s achievements. But this is a private sentiment. Madeleine is quite a considerable public figure — that’s perfectly obvious without my telling her what I think.
What Is Immigration Policy For? by Madeleine Sumption (Bristol University Press £9.99). To order go to timesbookshop.co.uk. The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law by Jonathan Sumption (Profile Books £10.99). To order go to timesbookshop.co.uk
Strange habits
Madeleine on Jonathan
My mum cuts his hair. He hasn’t been to a hairdresser for more than 40 years
Jonathan on Madeleine
She treats sleep like an elite sport. She takes tinfoil on holiday in case there are no blackout blinds
