Morality is a serious game for Cameron

After Gordon Brown revealed that he saw himself as the Byronic hero Heathcliff, David Cameron upped the ante by comparing his party’s progress to that of Lara Croft, the star of the computer game Tomb Raider. “There is an element to politics that is a bit like Tomb Raider,” said the Tory leader. Until you clear level one, he suggested, you can’t move onto level two. “Level one is: are you a reasonable, decent, sensible, practical person who wants to live in a modern world? If so, you can move onto level two, where you can talk about difficult issues around families.”

Believing he was firmly on level two, Cameron marched into Brown’s heartland of Glasgow East, location of this week’s by-election, to insist that the prime minister was presiding over a broken society. Denying that he was exaggerating Britain’s troubles, the old Etonian, 20 points ahead in the polls, told The Guardian: “There’s a general incivility people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence.”

The answer? Everyone needs to be accountable for the choices they make. In Cameron’s sights last week were black men who desert their families. Cameron backed Barack Obama, the American presidential candidate, himself raised in a fatherless household, who recently said, “What makes a man a man is not the ability to have a child but to raise one.” Cameron said: “I’ve had meetings with black church leaders who make the same point. They are concerned about family and social breakdown and want to see a ‘responsibility revolution’ take place.”

So how is order maintained in the Cameron household? With a mix of carrot and stick, he reveals. Cameron and his wife Samantha have three children. As well as their disabled son Ivan, 6, there’s Nancy, 4, and Arthur Elwen, 2. With Nancy, “we do a bit of ‘naughty step’ [which is] very successful. But you can’t do it too early. We have a star chart [too] and that is working”.

- Mother alienated – daughter fine When she was a tall, lanky 14-year-old, Sigourney Weaver was “always worried whether things were going to work out”. The star of Alien, in London to promote the new children’s movie Wall-E, revealed that her English mother was “always trying to make sure I wasn’t conceited, to the point where I had a real inferiority complex. I would say, ‘Gosh, mummy, am I pretty?’ And she would say, ‘Well, no you’re plain, my dear, but never mind’ ”. This made Weaver feel so insecure that she decided to change her name from Susan to Sigourney. But at least the hang-ups haven’t filtered through. Weaver’s daughter Charlotte, 18, is “not a tortured soul; she’s a cork who’ll bob through life”, Weaver told The Times.

- Portrait of artist wanting a baby Every art gallery wants her work and every party wants her as a star guest – but, at 45, the artist Tracey Emin is worried she might be missing out on motherhood. “I’m quite a good woman, but I’m obviously not good enough to have someone’s children. It’s pretty irritating,” she told The Times. Emin, whose two pregnancies in her twenties ended in abortions, revealed that she made a promise to herself to have her first baby at 40 after making her first million. Now she’s going out with Scott Douglas, a photographer who already has children of his own. “Every day,” said Emin, “I’m writing it [the prospect of having children] off. I knew it would do my head in around the time.”

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