Of all the things politicians can do for us, the most gratifying is to cock up something basic so we can all enjoy a satisfying little laugh.

And when David Cameron, the British PM, was revealed this week to have left his eight-year-old daughter down the boozer after a Sunday lunch, he generated a genuine pulse of international joy and elation among sullen parents everywhere.

Out they came, whooping, from the closet - an international athletes' parade of the parentally inept, waving proudly from beneath their bunglers' banners.

The guys who have driven off with a baby capsule on the roof. The chicks who have left their kids in shops. Everyone's got a tale to tell, and I refer you to my colleague Paul Daley in these very pages today for an especially scarifying document of self-criticism.

My own eight-year-old self would probably have heard the tale with incredulity, bordering on outright jealousy: how come Nancy Cameron gets to go IN the pub? My brothers and I always had to wait outside in the ute, bickering or - on the odd, parental-reputation-enhancing day - sharing a packet of chips.

But to see a political leader bugger it up - now, that really does warm the cockles.

I remember feeling the same swell of pride in 2003 on hearing the National Party's Larry Anthony - who at the time was federal minister for children's services - outline what was then a recent parenting achievement recorded at a local agricultural show in his electorate.

Running late for the sheaf racing, or pig tossing, or whatever it was that he was there to adjudicate, Anthony parked in the parking paddock, locked up the vehicle and then bolted for the appropriate dais and microphone.

It was only some time later, after he had performed his duties with distinction, that he recalled having left two of his kids strapped in the back of the car. Both were recovered, with no harm done. What made Anthony's tale quite so spectacular is that he chose to tell it at the launch of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, before a fascinated and - after the story - mildly horrified audience of children's health and education professionals.

''I don't know how you're going to keep track of 10,000 children,'' he concluded gaily, as his press secretary smiled that peculiar brand of fixed smile that press secretaries get when they know all holy hell is about to break loose.

''I can't even keep track of two!''

Cameron's timing was also excellent. The Sun broke the news of his parental inattention on the very day the Prime Minister was due to announce a new funding package to assist dysfunctional families.

And as we all know, when one is pointing one's finger at chronically welfare-dependent and troubled families, nothing erodes the moral high ground quite like a recent and widely publicised trip to the pub from which one returned pleasantly pickled and short one ankle-biter.

Additionally, the story coincided with revelations - delivered in a new biography of Cameron - that he prefers to ''chillax'' at the weekend by singing karaoke, playing video games, drinking moderately at lunch and smashing balls at a tennis machine he has nicknamed ''The Clegger'', after his Deputy Prime Minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg.

These were surprising insights, of course. Anyone who's been paying attention would simply have assumed that Cameron's leisure time is chiefly occupied with sending fond text messages to Rebekah Brooks and annotating his appointments diary to comply with the demands of the Leveson Inquiry, before which he spent several tedious hours on Thursday obediently reliving long-forgotten lunches with media nobodies and trying to remember when he first met Elisabeth Murdoch.

(Is it my imagination, or has the Leveson Inquiry now formally replaced the Westminster system of government in Britain? And when, exactly, did it stop being an exercise in outrage at the prying of media organisations into the private lives of celebrities and politicians and start being an exercise in actually prying into the private lives of celebrities and politicians? Or am I being a little too harsh?)

But at least David Cameron has hobbies, Lord love him.

The worst thing prime ministers can do is not have hobbies.

Our own Prime Minister, as disclosed in an interview last weekend, knits matinee jackets for babies and fends off incontinent possums from the roof cavity of The Lodge by way of relaxation.

Her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, came dangerously close to having no leisure time at all, unless you count the moonlit hours spent devising cruel and unusual ordeals for federal bureaucrats, or phone-stalking Ban Ki-moon.

A stressed-out prime minister is a bad prime minister, as Cameron himself explained recently to a radio presenter who couldn't quite get over the video games.

He's right. Even if a kid occasionally gets left at the bar.

A Little Shameless Schadenfreude