David Cameron’s Go-to Parenting Guru

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Janice Turner meets Octavius Black, an Eton contemporary of the Prime Minister, who is using his millions to teach parents about the naughty step

A mother is explaining her daughter’s eccentric diet. “Jasmine only eats neutral-coloured foods,” she says. “Cheese, chicken, Cheerios. Weetabix is a bit dark for her.” I am attending a government-sponsored class run by Parent Gym at a primary school in a poorer quarter of Camden in North London. Healthy eating is one of today’s “missions” and the teacher – or rather “coach”, as we must call her – hands out a magazine full of cheery tips for fusspot eaters.

There are 11 parents here this morning, all mums; dads are rare. The coach turns to last week’s missions, which the students were supposed to apply at home. One of the headscarved Bangladeshi women, who make up the majority of the class, says she used a Parent Gym technique to stop her sons from squabbling. Another has started a scrapbook with her daughter chronicling how the family migrated to London. The class’s tone is encouraging, warm and non-judgmental; the women chip in with ideas that the coach jots on her whiteboard.

Reference: 52weeksofgeek.com

But then comes the turn of one white single mom. It’s been a bad week: her kid was out of control. The police were called. (I learn later that she is well known to social services and that this is her sixth parenting course.) So we pass over on to brighter territory: how do you get your kids to stick at their homework? “I never understand it,” says her friend. “I leave it until he sees his dad.”

Since this is the last of the five courses in the programme, the parents have been asked to bring along “nibbles”. The Bangladeshi women unwrap home-cooked Bengali dishes which they set up on a trestle table to share. The three white working-class women – two of them morbidly obese – produce Mr Kipling cakes and one-litre bottles of cola, which they consume without offering them around. The healthy-eating messages hang in the air.

Finally, the school’s parent liaison officer comes around and, to each woman who has attended at least four out of the five classes, hands a £50 check. Parent Gym is one of 15 organisations – including the National Childbirth Trust and Save the Children – approved by the Government to teach parenting. Under this new coalition initiative, anyone with a child under 5 is entitled to a voucher offering a free course worth £100. However, Parent Gym, a philanthropic body, does not keep the Government’s money, but donates it back to the place that hosts the course. This particular Camden primary has elected to keep £50 towards school funds and offers the rest as a financial incentive. The mums discuss keeping their group going next term (without payment). Will they? Perhaps…

Later, the coach is frank about why her students show up: “For the money. Some of these ladies don’t even speak English.” But she doesn’t think this is necessarily bad. The cash entices the poorest, those most alienated from school, and encourages the Bangladeshis to integrate more. Besides, she often sees a mother gain confidence from sharing her worries with the group or learning a small yet transformative tip. “That woman who didn’t understand the homework has trouble disciplining her son. He opened the present she bought him before his birthday and broke it. She stood up to him and didn’t replace it. It was the first time she’d taken control.”

Across town, in an exquisite Georgian square just off Kensington High Street, the offices of Mind Gym are in an entirely different London. With its ergonomic furniture, Damien Hirst dot prints and young, hyper-helpful, dressed-down staff, there’s the air of a groovy internet start-up. Mind Gym, having made a fortune teaching business skills to blue-chip clients such as BT and Vodafone, set up Parent Gym in 2009 as its charitable wing. And although it was running classes coached by unpaid volunteers long before David Cameron launched his initiative, Mind Gym has encountered controversy because of the insider Tory connections of its founder, Octavius Black.

An Eton contemporary of the Prime Minister and a friend of Michael Gove, Black is married to Joanne Cash, a former Tory candidate who stood unsuccessfully for Westminster North. Her 2010 campaign was beset by quarrels with her old-guard constituency chairwoman. At one point Cash quit, but was reinstated after Cameron intervened. “I did resign. Assoc did not accept. CCHQ has resolved specific issue so I am not leaving. It’s official DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!” she crowed on Twitter. On election night, she made a bitter speech addressing the press she believed had lied about her husband and scuppered her campaign: “You are on notice. No more lies!”

For this reason, not to mention his Harry Potter wizard’s name, forbidding black brows and reputation for stonewalling all personal inquiries, I am uneasy about meeting Octavius Black. Moreover, his first Mind Gym book has a whole chapter on “presence” that explains how to dominate a meeting. Apparently, you stand up and pour coffee while your adversary is speaking; it puts them on the back foot. Elsewhere, the book advises wearing red to look assertive, so I come armed with a large scarlet bag.

In fact, like almost every Old Etonian I’ve ever met, Black is absurdly charming with a booming, “rilly rilly” posh voice. When faced with a question he dislikes – ie, anything that might illuminate his political views or connections – he runs his hands through his thick, now largely gray cowlick and emits a hearty bass laugh to cover what would otherwise be an awkward silence.

It is a controversial idea, that parenting needs to be taught. It suggests that natural skills are no longer being passed on. And since the Government and Parent Gym before it target the most disadvantaged boroughs, does this imply that the poor are worse parents? “I would fight vehemently against that accusation,” says Black. “I have seen nothing that correlates wealth and quality of parenting. I have seen some great parenting at all levels, and the reverse.”

Parent Gym began after Black canvassed with his wife in Westminster North, an inner London constituency where the richest and poorest in Britain can be found living within a few streets. They met Shaun Bailey (another unsuccessful Tory candidate of 2010), who ran the youth project My Generation on tough North Kensington estates and noted that many children were barely parented and often left to raise themselves.

“Talking to parents, you realised how keen they were and, secondly, how some quite simple things were missing,” says Black. “One mom had a brand new, pristine tracksuit and trainers, hair done, make-up. She had two daughters and was struggling to get them to behave. So I said to her, ‘Have you thought about having a reward chart?’ She said, ‘Yes, my daughter brought one home from school. It made her behavior better.’ I said, ‘Are you using it now?’ ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It filled up.’ There were loads of examples like that. It’s how do you get people thinking so they can solve the problem better themselves.”

Black refuses to be drawn into the politics of the scheme or the Left’s critique that hard-pressed parents – rather than poverty or poor housing – are being blamed for all social ills, including last summer’s riots. For him, the case for parenting classes is “evidence-based”. There are countless studies that show good family bonds are more influential on a child’s future than any school: “We know that literacy levels, secure attachment, the ability to connect with other people – all these things come back to early-years experience.” Parent Gym applies itself to sorting out a child’s tantrums or a disastrous morning routine that makes him late for school, just as Mind Gym solves, say, a company’s staff-retention problem: look at the causes, apply psychology and social-science findings and create solutions that are small, digestible nuggets.

Browsing through Black’s book, I find it hard to concentrate for more than five minutes, such is my allergy to the self-help guides and flip-chart management-speak of which Mind Gym seems to be the bastard child. Take page 65: “We all have a choice how we run our lives. There is no ‘can’t’, only ‘will’ or ‘won’t’.” Black laughs self-deprecatingly at my irritation. “Mind Gym isn’t for everybody,” he says. “There is lots to love about journalists, but a desire for self-improvement is not normally high on the list, and that’s fine.”

So what does Mind Gym actually do? Black, originally a management consultant, and Sebastian Bailey, a business psychologist, invented the concept of “brain workouts” 12 years ago. Rather than spend a whole day solving a problem, they proposed doing it in an intense 90-minute session. Their first client was Deutsche Bank.

I ask Black for a typical Mind Gym scenario and he recalls a bank with dire customer service. He interviewed a cashier called Azim, and the next person he met was wearing a badge with the same name. It turns out he borrowed it from Azim – employees were penalised for not wearing a badge and he’d forgotten his own. “That tells you how people think about customer service,” he says. “So our bit is how we can change them to think that it’s not all about name badges and check lists.”

Mind Gym now employs 150 coaches across the world, with teams in Dubai, New York and Singapore, and has made Black a multimillionaire. He claims to have earned his fortune without parental help. His father, Brinsley, was an advertising executive and noted dandy. (“Something I haven’t inherited from him,” says Black in his unbuttoned white shirt and dad-jeans.) “When I left university, he said to me, ‘You won’t see another penny from us until we die, but we are here for you in every other respect.’ And he kept his promise.” When Black coveted an old Eighties two-seater Mercedes, his father told him he’d spotted one in Manchester. Black says, “So he went up there, checked out the car. It was beautiful and had been well looked after. So he buys the car, wings it home and gives me a receipt for the car and a one-way rail ticket to Manchester. He charged me for his train journey. And good for him.”

Black’s mother, Lady Moorea Hastings, the daughter of a Labour peer, was the source of his unusual and irreducible name – “No one has ever called me Oct. Well, not for very long.” She had run away from school to become an actress with the RSC, but quit acting long before he was born, wrote travel pieces, then became a prison visitor and served as a magistrate in Highbury, North London, until she retired. He has a half-brother, Pericles, from her first marriage to the journalist Woodrow Wyatt.

Black recalls much talk of social issues over the kitchen table. His father, who loathed snobbery and prejudice, was once invited onto a yacht in Ibiza on which another guest went into an anti-Semitic rant. “My father got absolutely furious and properly took him on. The guy pulled the boat up to the shore and said, ‘Get out, now!’ Dad was like, ‘Fine, I’m off.’ He had very high principles. I learnt about fighting for the things that matter most.”

He was sent to board at 12, then on to Eton. The strength of the school, he says, is its range of extracurricular pursuits. “There was a metal workshop where some boys were building a hovercraft,” he recalls. “There were so many opportunities to be successful at something. That gives you great confidence.”

Black’s father died last year, followed just three weeks later by his mother. “There’s a wonderful story,” says Octavius. “Whenever they went to parties, no one could ever dance with my mother because my father would always be dancing with her. It’s so lovely. So I kind of think that she didn’t want to dance alone and died of a broken heart.” He has barely begun to process their loss. “I think about them many times a day. I still think, ‘I must tell them this, that or the other.’ It’s tough.” He is grateful his parents at least had the chance to meet his daughter, who has just turned 2.

Now 44, he was late to fatherhood – indeed, he launched Parent Gym well before he had a child. He has since changed his working patterns, returning home at about 6pm to put her to bed. “It is the richest and most enjoyable part of my life, but also very difficult. There are times when you think, ‘What is the right thing to do here?’” He tells me his daughter is obsessed with planes, so he took her to Heathrow just to watch them take off and land. That’s devoted, I say. “Well, maybe that’s the advantage of being a late-onset parent. You are willing to make those levels of effort.”

He and Cash, 42, a libel barrister, hope to have more children, “but who knows”. They met in 2007 at a party, although mutual friends who thought them well-matched had been just about to set them up. After a few drinks, Cash dashed off early; Black thought he’d blown it, but Cash later revealed that she’d rushed off to be formally accepted as Westminster North’s candidate.

Cash’s pregnancy, announced in the run-up to the 2010 election, caused controversy in her constituency party. “I felt a lot of the criticism was very unfair. This seems to be the only job left in Britain where you can quite openly say, ‘Are you up for that job if you’re pregnant?’ ” Did he think her post-election speech ill-advised? “I thought she hadn’t slept for 36 hours, she was stuffed with a lot of hormones being pregnant and she wasn’t herself,” he says.

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