Every child has the right to feel safe, loved and as if they belong.

Put like that, there is nothing remotely radical about what the Princess of Wales used her first public speech since recovering from cancer to say: that families need consistently nurturing environments to flourish; that the world could actually use a bit more tenderness; that we are all responsible for the culture in which future generations grow up; and that (as she told an audience of blue-chip employers) caring for others is work deserving of respect. It’s the reasons why those motherhood-and-apple-pie values don’t always prevail in real life, rather than the values themselves, that are generally too contentious for the carefully apolitical royals. Yet what were once safe, bland nothings are increasingly no longer so – and not just because of the awkward shadow now cast over any royal initiative involving childhood by the former prince Andrew’s infamous association with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

There was something strangely jarring about listening to a princess talk earnestly about the need of children to be surrounded by “love, safety and rhythm” in the same week that Lord Alf Dubs, himself a former child refugee, was denouncing a Labour home secretary’s proposal to remove financial support from families with children whose asylum claims have failed, and ultimately to round up and deport them. (Shabana Mahmood had argued that successive governments’ longstanding nervousness about subjecting families to the same rules as lone asylum seekers risked creating a “perverse incentive” to bring small children across the Channel.)

The contrast won’t have been remotely intended, of course – Catherine is careful to avoid political........

© The Guardian