Nagging for your country

I mean, I thought our parents were putting pressure on us to achieve; but compared to this...

At the age of eleven the boy got weekly letters at prep school telling him "You are to get a first in History at Cambridge and do all sorts of grand things." An only mildly critical maths report would bring the admonition "I want for my darling to do everything perfectly' because, as he never tired of pointing out, "I long for you to do your best.... that you may turn out the pride and happiness of our life - we have had so much sorrow in the past that now everything seems to centre on you."

and on his twelfth birthday,

"You do not know how precious you are in my eyes my own dearest child - my only little son left now that God has taken my other three to himself - all my hopes and joys are bound up in you - what should I do without you?"

And when he did go to Cambridge and get a first in History an a fellowship of All Souls his father wrote

"I am quite convinced that you are going to be Prime Minister and reunite England with the Holy See."

That was Lord Halifax, prominent appeaser, nearly got to be PM instead of Churchill in 1940; though perhaps that might not have been the best moment to reunite England with the Holy See, all things considered.