Does involving your children in your public life mean that you are “using” them? Is such an action always exploitative? I ask because last week David Cameron invited ITN’s cameras into his lovely home to film the family - David, 41, Samantha, 36, Ivan, 5, Nancy, 4, and Arthur, 3 - having their breakfast and getting ready for school.

He did not invite the cameras in for the sheer blissful fun of it, obviously. He had just announced Conservative plans to give new parents the right to take leave together for the first six months of their baby’s life and was due to make further “family friendly” announcements at the party’s spring conference.

The public breakfasting - the Cameron levee, if you will - was therefore designed to show a) that the Camerons are normal people who do normal things such as brush their children’s hair and ask them which cereal they’d prefer; ergo b) that the Tories are no longer the party that looks as though it snacks on babies for breakfast. Also c) that Old Etonians and their baronet’s daughter wives aren’t necessarily served devilled kidneys out of domed silver dishes by a butler.

I find c) disappointing - I wish political leaders made more jokes. Gordon Brown could feast on bread and lard for the cameras while mumbling gruffly about it being a special treat, for instance, and Cameron could - I don’t know - horsewhip some peasants while playing polo and shouting: “I’m just like you, really.”

“People want to know who you are and what you are like and what makes you tick,” Cameron said of the footage. “That’s modern politics. You just have to do what you feel comfortable with. If you are trying to put yourself forward and your policies and everything else, people want to know a bit about you and your life.” This approach is, of course, the diametrical opposite of the prime minister’s (who, let us not forget, is married to an extremely media-savvy former PR).

A friend of Brown’s said last week that he took a firm line on this issue and had asked newspapers and broadcasters not to use pictures of his sons: “What he says to friends is that he made his own choice to go into politics and public life, but that he will not make that choice for his children.”

His predecessor was regularly photographed en famille outside No 10, although he asked for privacy on holiday and had an agreement with the press that the family would be photographed upon arrival at whatever destination and would then be left in peace for the remainder of their stay.

However, times change and I don’t know that the condemnation Cameron has received from some quarters for “using” his family is entirely justified. It’s hard to make the accusation that “nobody asked his kids what they thought” stick, since his children are very small and, one imagines, don’t hold particularly strong views on the subject. It’s equally hard to see how being seen skipping about and eating Cheerios is somehow corrupting their innocence by dragging them into the grubby world of politics.

Ivan is severely disabled and I’m of the opinion that the more disabled children are seen on television engaging in cheerful, everyday family life the better. (The supposition, made more than once, that Cameron somehow “uses” Ivan’s disability to garner sympathy is risible: whatever you may think of Cameron publicly volunteering slices of his private life, Ivan is very much part of that life. He’s not using him, he’s being his father.)

Nevertheless, the Cameron film (not the first of its kind - his video website, the ingeniously named Webcameron, was launched with another slice of family life, with David doing the washing up) is both a clever move and a potentially disastrous one.

It is clever because Cameron and his advisers recognise that the public has an almost insatiable appetite for the minutiae of public figures’ private lives and more access to it than ever via magazines and the internet. Feeding that appetite - and being the first politician consciously to do so - seems both modern and refreshing.

Once people have stopped scrutinising the decor of Cameron’s house - classic west London bourgeois bohemian - the impression that remains is of a luxe version of “ordinariness”, although there’s a telling moment when Cameron quickly rakes his hand through his hair after playing with Arthur: it’s a typical public school boy move - see also Hugh Grant.

Coupled with his pronouncements and evident devotion to his own family, Cameron’s television appearance may well succeed in rebranding the Conservative party as the most obviously family-friendly one. Watching the ITN footage last week, I thought that it was exactly this kind of breezy, confident, modern-seeming vignette that made people like me prick up their ears when he first came on the scene.

It would be absurd to claim that people vote one way or another because they like the candidate’s taste in soft furnishings (and there are no John Lewis MPs’ specials chez Cameron) or admire the way they interact with their children, but it would be equally absurd to assume that these things are altogether irrelevant.

There is only one problem and it’s quite a big one. In these troubled times, people don’t necessarily want to remember that Cameron has a nice dining chair that appears to be upholstered in fake fur, or that his daughter Nancy wears sweet little mary-janes (see what I mean? And I’ve only watched the footage once).

If you’re sitting fretting about your mortgage or anxious about the markets crashing or wondering when your replacement sat nav is going to be nicked again, and what the likelihood is of being mugged if you go for a pint of milk after 9pm, the Cameron Cheerios start to look almost like an insult. Result: you go heading off in the opposite direction, confident in the knowledge that at least Brown doesn’t feel the need to make little films about doing the dishes or being nice to his children.

That might not make him modern or down with the kids on Facebook or especially adept at communicating his enthusiasms to People Like Us (possibly because he has no great enthusiasm for People Like Us in the first place), but it does make him feel like a safer pair of hands.

Still, I did like Nancy’s ballerina lunchbox.

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