Not Now, Bernard: Board Book: 1

Product Information

even more relevant in an era of parents glued to their mobile phones' DAILY MAIL, Best Reads Ever'Arguably the finest children's book ever written, McKee's clever fable is both a warning to neglectful parents and a very funny story about being ignored. Children get it, it's not scary, just funny, the illustrations are very clear and the characters are brilliant. I have had a larger 'Not Now Bernard' book for many years now and have read it with all my children. For at least one more week, British politics is contained in that sealed chamber where there is a Boris legacy to celebrate, where the solution to poverty is corporate tax cuts, where the solution to everything is tax cuts, where tax cuts have no impact on public service budgets, where life outside the EU is all upside and can only get better. Brussels, she said, would immediately be cowed into “side deals” to mitigate any possible harm, the threat of which was, in any case, vastly exaggerated by lily-livered remoaners.

Think about this: If the story was just about a naughty boy being eaten by a monster and made no mention of his parents' neglect of him, we would probably jump at the chance to read it to our children, in the hope it would encourage them to behave themselves.At first I thought it was about a monster eating Bernard but it turned out that Bernard was the monster because of him getting angry from constantly getting ignored from his parents. This is a good book about teaching children the importance of inclusion and not ignoring each other.

There is a book that foresaw with precision this summer’s Conservative leadership contest, although it was first published in 1980.This short, simple story tackles the issue of a young boy who tries to get the attention of his mum and dad, and yet every attempt is met with a "Not now, Bernard". Then there is that other monster, the one that has become such a fixture in the garden that even the opposition seems not to notice it any more. His famous characters include Elmer the patchwork elephant, Mr Benn, King Rollo and of course Bernard. And too late, because Brexit is the settled will of the people and any hint of a downside is sedition.