Move over, boy named Sue: here comes little Thatcher

How much is too much when it comes to picking a name for your children? Katie Rosseinsky on dubious parental choices

- Katie Rosseinsky

On Tuesday, Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick reportedly elicited shocked gasps from the audience during an on-stage interview at the Conservative Party conference. What prompted such reverberations from the party faithful? Was it a controversial new policy, an outlandish campaign slogan, or one of those cringey pop culture references that politicians sometimes use when they're trying to seem totally normal, honest? No: it was the revelation that the ex-cabinet minister named his 11-year-old daughter in tribute to a certain former prime minister. Her middle name is "Thatcher".

Jenrick noted that his daughter was born the same year that Margaret Thatcher died - as if that somehow made this decision a totally reasonable one- and claimed that the name was "a good way of reminding her of a good prime minister", as well as being a tribute to "strong women". It's just the latest example of the Tories' bizarre one-upmanship when it comes to Thatcher idolatry; at this point in the leadership contest, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the candidates set up an Iron Lady hologram in their garden shed, like some nightmare neoliberal version of ABBA Voyage. But it also poses the question: how "out there" is too "out there" when it comes to naming your children?

Names are a key part of our identity; they're usually the first thing that other people learn about us and might, for better or worse, shape their perceptions accordingly. And we're generally expected to keep them for our entire lives (unless we pull off cultivating a nickname or go down the route of changing our moniker by deed poll, before drowning in admin to amend ID documents accordingly). Parents certainly have a big responsibility: they must consider how their preferred name choice will impact their kid day to day, from childhood, into the minefield of embarrassment that is adolescence, and then into adulthood.