And, given that one of the incidents which led to the recall was his 12year old son taking a toy gun to school, one might agree. Admittedly, that is the sort of behaviour children usually outgrow at around eight years of age, unless they've taken to wearing black trenchcoats and writing emo poetry.
But the other incident was rather more disturbing. His 19year old son took part in an armed robbery two years ago. Knife crime among adolescents has sparked major concern in the UK in recent years, and in this context one can understand their reluctance to harbour people who are immune from prosecution because of their diplomatic status.
To dismiss armed robbery with a statement like "children will be children" does adolescents everywhere a disservice. For many teenagers, it is not "normal" to form knife-wielding gangs to rob others of their possessions, and the fact that some parents consider this behaviour "normal" is alarming. Perhaps it is too common in our schools, and perhaps desensitisation has taken place, outside of the polite suburbs.
Perhaps, too, it is simply the flip side of a social obsession with some idealised notion of "childhood past", some Golden Age against which today's childhood can be classified "toxic", today's children pitied - and feared. Recent press paranoia about MXit - largely ill-informed - reveals a generation that is reluctant to engage, unwilling to admit ignorance and unable to accept that anything not under their control can be anything but evil.
Perhaps if the middle-aged guardians of social mores were a little more honest in their reconstructed rememberings of their own adolescent years, beyond the airbrushed convenience that age brings, the debates on childhood might progress beyond stereotypes of good and evil, and allow real engagement with the challenges and choices that real children face in real time, without the judgment