David Cameron, like the rest of us, is not immune to criticism from his mother

So far as I’m aware, a maternal assault on a serving PM is unprecedented

David Cameron with his mother Mary - who is also campaigning against the cuts - at Wimbledon in 2015 (PA)

After a typically selfless quest for a cultural reference point to soothe David Cameron’s soul after what must have been a troubling week on the family front, my best advice is this. The Prime Minister should settle down tonight for a spot of chillaxing over a few early episodes of The Sopranos, purely to place the difficult mother thing in perspective.

If the PM is smarting from the implied attack by his dear old mummy, small wonder about that. During a visit to her little lad’s constituency of Witney, you may have read, Mrs Mary Cameron took the trouble to sign a petition against the proposed closures of various children’s services to which Oxfordshire council has been driven by scything cuts in government funding.

While Mother Cameron declined to comment, her sister Clare Currie was more forthcoming. In PG Wodehouse terms, Clare appears to be the clan’s Aunt Agatha (the ferocious battleaxe who incessantly berates her nephew for being an imbecile) to Mr Cameron’s Bertie Wooster. These cuts, she told ITV News, are “a great, great error... It’s a very short-sighted decision”.

A more reticent Mother Cameron restricted herself to a brusque “my name is on the petition but I don’t want to discuss this any further”, but did she need to say any more? The simple act of appending her name to a form had said enough. And what it said, according to the latest Written Signature-Monty Python translation software, was this. “My son isn’t the messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”

Now none of this makes Mrs Cameron the retired home counties equivalent of Tony Soprano’s mother. Named after the wife of the Emperor Augustus, arguably history’s most resolutely murderous and unmaternal women, Livia Soprano is no paradigm of the doting Italian mama. A screechingly embittered hyper-narcissistic sociopath, Livia plotted with Tony’s Uncle Junior – the Auntie Clare of the piece – to kill him in Junior’s interests.

So some consolation there, one has to hope, for the PM. His mother may be furious with him. She may regard his administration as shamefully indifferent to the plight of Oxfordshire families (and even perhaps families in other counties) who need help. She may, even, be rerouting chunks of David’s inheritance to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and public service trade unions. But what she isn’t doing, it feels safe to assume, is scheming to ice the Prime Minister and install her sister Clare as No 10’s capo di tutt’i capi in his stead.

And yet he must feel humiliated by her intervention. So far as I’m aware, a maternal assault on a serving PM, even one as implicit as this, is unprecedented. The mother-child relationship may be the backbone of psychoanalysis, but in the history of British politics it has until now been the dog that never barked.

Winston Churchill seemed to glamorise his mother in the way of the son sent to boarding school as a small boy, but without any apparent psychic angst. Anthony Eden’s mother was quite a card (he was never entirely sure of his paternity), but no one has tried to pin Suez on that. Margaret Thatcher was so fixated on her father that she didn’t even acknowledge her mother’s existence in her Who’s Who entry. Mr Tony Blair’s mother died when he was a very young man, so it fell by default to his father Leo to be the embarrassing parent with an anecdote about how, when the family was emigrating to Adelaide and the ship’s band struck up, exhibitionist toddler Tony danced until his nappy fell down. “Thanks, Dad,” he ruefully muttered when Sue Lawley trotted out the anecdote on Desert Island Discs.

Lest Mr Cameron is tempted toward a sarcastic “Thanks, Mum”, he should consider that a critical mother might be preferable to a traditionally doting one. A chat with his old boss and mentor Michael Howard would illuminate the point.

About 25 years ago, Lord Howard had hopes of succeeding John Major as Tory leader in an era when being Jewish wasn’t necessarily a huge help to such a dream. He wasn’t trying to disguise his origins, but he certainly seemed to be making efforts to present himself as a Tory toff.

When he became embroiled in some long-forgotten furore about the telling of fibs (not the prisons row, which came later), I felt his mother needed support. My grandmother, Bessie Norman, a close friend of Mrs Hilda Howard on the Elderly Jewish Ladies North London Kalooki Circuit, gave me her phone number. When I rang Hilda to commiserate, we got to chatting about the old days. She recalled how Michael once went home to Llanelli for Rosh Hashanah with his Cambridge University friend Leon Brittan. Well, she said, they went off to synagogue, and on the way home they were soaked in a rainstorm. “Leon’s suit was all had with him,” she reminisced. “I had to dry it out on my hostess trolley.”

Whether it was the hostess trolley (not a huge winner among the snobby grouse moor clique) or the archetypal protective Jewish mother schtick, or most likely both, he was less than thrilled when the conversation appeared in print. According to Bessie, relations were strained for a long while.

There is no way of knowing whether a broigus, to give any inter-family froideur its technical Yiddish name, will ensue between David and Mary Cameron because – ably assisted by Auntie Clare – she has placed him on the metaphorical naughty step. Mothers, love them as we do, are seldom easy. But on balance, one who tacitly lacerates your fiscal cruelty is probably preferable to one who frets about your lack of sleep, be it in your bed or with the fishes.