I somehow managed to miss the Sport Relief Great Celebrity Bake Off last night on BBC1 because I am not interested in watching people bake cakes. I know that means I am in a tiny minority in this country, for Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood are pretty much national heroes these days and I expect life peerages to be granted anytime soon. Anyway, among last night’s ‘celebrities’ was the PM’s wife Samantha Cameron.
Now, Sam seems an amiable enough seriously rich lass. In fact, she seems to be a real human being who has lived a bit, attending the University of the West of England (UWE) and in so doing living in a particularly “edgy” area of Bristol, namely…er…Clifton. As usual, with the wives of powerful people, Samantha (or Sam Cam as she is known by the red top newspapers) has an important job in politics. She is needed to stand next to her husband and wear nice frocks and smile a lot. Apart from that, she is normally seen but not heard.
Look away now if you are avoiding the Bake Off result because it seems Mrs Cameron, bless her, won. I do not know what she baked, nor do I particularly care, but the very fact that she appeared at all will surely give Dave a few witty jokes when he next cuts a social security benefit: “Let them eat cake, baked by my wife.”
I welcome Sam Cam’s involvement. She was obviously asked by the BBC to do the show (“Sam – we’re bricking it that your old man might abolish us. Would you mind coming along, baking a few cakes and then going home and telling him how nice we all are?”) and from the accounts I have seen she did very well. But it is very ironic given what Sport Relief exists for.
Charities exist, lest we forget, to pay for things that society deems not important enough to pay for through taxation. Half of what we give to Sport Relief goes to fund projects at home, the other half goes to fund projects abroad. The sort of things we don’t regard as important enough to fund through tax include providing services for dementia or to people suffering from serious mental health problems. There are plenty of other examples, believe me. As someone who now works in the ‘third sector’, I have been surprised, to say the least, at the lack of public provision for people in crisis. Amazed is a better word. Without the charities funding what I would argue are essential, front-line services, there are many people out there whose lives would be unbearable and, dare I say it, hardly worth living. (These are not my words: they are paraphrased from the words of others.) So Sport Relief matters more than I ever imagined it might.
Sam Cam is not responsible for the wasteland her husband is making of this country. She might have a quiet word in his ear about the people who are being dumped on my his ministers, like the odious Iain Duncan Smith and Jeremy Hunt, not to mention the slimy bloke next door, but Dave is the elected politician. So going onto Sport Relief is a good thing and I praise her for so doing.
I always struggle with the paradox of politicians supporting something made even more necessary as a result of their actions but all the charities like Sport Relief are trying to do is to cover the gaps left by governments here and abroad.
