The only good thing – well, the only not completely terrible thing – about the abduction last week in Boston of seven-year-old Reigh Mills Boss by her father, Clark Rockefeller, is that father and daughter are said to get on famously. Rockfeller was arrested last night and his daughter was found in a nearby apartment.

Stateside neighbours in New Hampshire may describe Rockefeller – he and his ex-wife are American but were based in London; they have property in both places – as “phoney”, “odd” and “weird as the day is long”, but Aileen Ang, a friend who was paid $500 by Rockefeller to drive him and his daughter to Grand Central station in New York (she believed he had been granted custody), said last week that the little girl, known to her family as Snooks, “was happy playing in the back. She was actually saying, ‘I love you too much, daddy’. He would respond, ‘I love you even more’. So it was kind of, I thought, normal”.

Others have also commented on the fact that Rockefeller “dotes” on his daughter and was devastated when he lost custody of her last year. Before the supervised “contact visit” (such ugly, depressing vocab) in Boston last Sunday during which he kidnapped her, he is said not to have seen Reigh since his divorce from her mother last December. The couple had been married for 12 years and moved to London after Reigh’s mother, Sandra Boss, took up a job here as a partner at the management consultants McKinsey & Co.

Boss put out an appeal on US television last Friday. She said: “Clark, although many things have changed, you will always be Reigh’s father and I will always be Reigh’s mother. We both love her dearly and have only her best interests and wellbeing in our hearts. I ask you now, please, please, bring Snooks back.”

I’ll just detour for a minute to say: this particular story may be played out in public, with City salaries and grand jobs and properties on two continents, but a small version of the events plays itself out every day in more modest circumstances, with desperate and loving fathers being denied regular access to their children through nothing more than maternal spite.

It can unhinge them. There is no suggestion that Boss was remotely spiteful but the same can’t be said of every divorced woman. I know two lovely men, brilliant fathers, who adore their children but are prevented at every turn from seeing them regularly because their vindictive ex-wives still smart from being dumped. The court orders may grant access but court orders can’t force people to be in when they say they will be, or to open the door.

Quite what these women think they achieve by behaving in this way is a mystery. It seems extraordinary to me to put your own grievances ahead of your children’s emotional wellbeing; it is a form of emotional abuse and the child is always the victim. Not being the world’s happiest spouse doesn’t give you the right to become the world’s most appalling parent.

Anyway, Rockefeller: rum cove, to say the least. He gave the impression that he was part of the Rockefeller oil dynasty, indicated that he was a man of independent means, claimed he had been to Yale (he hadn’t), told his neighbours that he wearied of his personal chef’s rich food (“I’ve just about had enough confit de canard”), claimed, variously, to be engaged in secret work for the Pentagon and to bea mathematician, and a physicist, and hinted at “vast reserves of old wealth”.

When someone asked directly whether he was a member of the Rockefeller family, he said: “Maybe I am; maybe I’m not.” According to evidence used in the divorce case, Boss also discovered that her husband used a string of aliases; Clark Rockefeller was his most consistent name but he also asked people to call him Michael.

Michael Clark Rockefeller was indeed a member of the family behind Standard Oil; he disappeared on an expedition to New Guinea in 1961. It is possible that our Rockefeller assumed the identity of the missing man. The police have been unable to finda social security number for him and they cannot unearth his true identity. They described Rockefeller as a “ghost” who appeared to have laid a trail of false clues as he planned the abduction of his daughter.

The mystery is: who would marry sucha man? Boss is described as a City “super-woman”. She went to Stanford and Har-vard Business School and then worked on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch (she met her future husband during this time). She was also an aide to New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg. She was one of the top people at McKinsey’s Boston offices before being transferred to London. She and Rockefeller are believed to have married in 1995. After Reigh’s birth, Boss carried on working and Rockefeller became a house husband; he was apparently very good at it until the couple divorced.

Career powerhouses tend not to shack up with other powerhouses; they think it’s too stressful, too unsoothing, too frantic; there's never any down time. Men have known this for ever, hence the smiling, fragrant housewife. But women powerhouses are a relatively recent development and still struggle to get it right. They often just end up marrying bores or weirdos, safe (they think) in the belief that at least their marriage won’t be nightmarishly competitive and that it comes with built-in childcare.

This arrangement, I have observed, works only up to a point, the point being the one at which the man walks. It isn’t simply to do with emasculation, although that’s always a factor, but rather with the fact that having a house husband requires high-achieving women to create, and sustain, dual personalities: one for the office and a domestic one for home that pretends to be interested in what the other mummies said at the swings and wants to cook dinner instead of checking the markets and is never too tired for sex, even though she got up at 5am.

Any marriage built on fraud is ultimately headed for disaster: in the Boss/ Rockefeller case there was an embarrassment of half-truths. And, as ever, there is only one victim of such lies and power games: little Reigh, aka Snooks.

Scatty showers

Tourist authorities in Devon and Cornwall are complaining that inaccurate weather forecasts are putting people off visiting their counties for weekend breaks. Humphrey Temperley, a Devon county councillor, said last week that forecasters were “unnecessarily depressing” and ought to think about the impact of their doom-laden vocabulary. “It's the opposite of the Life of Brian,” he said. “It’s: always look on the dark side of life.”

He has a point. Are weather forecasts ever accurate? The sophisticated, up-to-the-minute one on my computer told me it would rain every day of last week. Bar a couple of 20-minute downpours, London was practically tropical. I went to Paris on Tuesday (I wish the French end of Eurostar would sort out its check-in procedure; it has the feel of 1970s Albania, with queues to match) with a mac in my suitcase, having read that it would rain pretty much solidly for the duration of my stay. Rain came there none: Paris sweltered in boiling sunshine.

Weather forecasts should occur only when there is a freak storm or biblical downpour on the way; in all other instances they are a waste of time. So what if you’re in Cornwall and it rains a bit? The view’s the same, the sea’s just as amazing, the fish is as fresh and if you wear a wetsuit you can still go surfing. It’s rain, not nuclear fallout. Wear a hood and be done with it.

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