Rise and rise of Smug Dad Syndrome

You want to know the real reason why Johnny Vaughan quit the Big Breakfast? He was suffering from an intense bout of fatigue envy.

"When I was doing the Big Breakfast I was tired champion of the world," explains Vaughan. "Then when my daughter Tabitha was born, I could no longer compete with my wife, Antonia, who was invariably suffering sleepless nights. My level of exhaustion was nothing."

So, Vaughan did the decent, fatherly thing. He traded mornings for late-night chat and took on board some vital 21st century Dad duties. In other words, he started to show-off in front of his mates.

"Tiredness has become a furiously competitive game with all the Dads I know," laughs Vaughan. "I was in a meeting the other morning and a Dad I work with rolled in looking shattered and bleary-eyed. The conversation went something like this: 'How long did you get last night?' 'An hour and a half at the most.' 'Really? Ours just sleeps for 20 minutes at a time at the moment. It's a nightmare.' Then, from the other side of the table, another Dad's voice piped up, 'Just the one, is it? You wait until you've got two. That's when the real nightmares start."

Vaughan and his mates are unwitting sufferers from SDS - Smug Dad Syndrome. Jude Law and David Beckham have got it bad too. So have I. It has interesting symptoms - Smug Dads are overtly affectionate and close to, and communicative and show-offy about their sprogs to the point of nausea. How can you tell if you have SDS? The early signs are easy to spot. Do you insist on feeding/holding/ changing nappies in public and/or at parties - even though you might never go near them at home? Do you play loud, ostentatious rough-and-tumble games in the park near childless couples? Do you secretly think that your kid is very bright for his/her age and infinitely better looking than your mate's kid? Are you the owner of a pavement-hogging, offroad capable baby-buggy bought "because Tom Cruise has one"?

Johnny Vaughan recognises such symptoms. "When I am pushing my daughter on the swings I tend to be a bit loud and boisterous. And when I see some miserable Dad reluctantly shoving the child on the swing next to me, I'm thinking, I'll bet his kid wishes she had a fun Dad like me!"

Vaughan is joking, of course, but Smug Dad can be cruel. Especially when it comes to his childless mates. When Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley became Britain's first showbiz couple, everyone wanted to know when they would be having children. When asked, Hugh would grimace and mutter something about how he had this recurring nightmare of ending up in a house in Battersea or Wandsworth with toys all over the living-room floor. He would say this as if there was no worse fate for a man. At the time, my first child had just been born and I had contracted incurable SDS. "Hey, Hughie," I thought, smugly. "Don't want to wait too long before you have kids otherwise, like Woody Allen once said, you'll be too old to pick them up."

Non-dads like Hugh tend to be vain creatures because they only have themselves to think about. Smug Dad is arguably much worse, because he parades a carefully mussed-up kind of anti-vanity, swopping sharp suits for park-friendly Gap, knowing full well that, when teamed with one of those sheepskin Bill Amberg papooses, just like David Beckham has, he will look impossibly cute in the sandpit.

But the sure-fire way to spot a Smug Dad is the masterful way he handles the stroller. For me the most significant advance in male development over the past 10 years has been the phasing-out of the one-handed baby-buggy push manoeuvre. Not familiar with it? I'll explain. Before pushchairs-became 4x4s with knobbly tyres, being a Dad just wasn't cool. Every Sunday, parks all over the country were filled with apathetic, buggy-pushing men. The unhappy pilots of these clattering eight-wheelers would show their displeasure by onehandedly guiding the machine, leaving their free hand plunged deep into the trouser pocket to confirm the overall image of total boredom.

Nowadays, you get Tom Cruise rollerblading through Hyde Park with his kids in a three-wheeled baby jogger, or David Beckham in masterful control of Brooklyn's buggy as Posh checks for clobber in the Gucci window.

So what has happened? Did the likes of Becks, Cruise and Jude make us men go all soft? Have our lives become like endless loops of that old Gillette ad ("The Best A Man Can Get") where the strong but sensitive hero is shown bearhugging his Dad, embracing his child and punching the air in smug delight at his own wonderfulness?

Hang on. You liked that ad? You identified with the star of that commercial? You, my friend, have caught fullblown SDS.

Lads unwind in a Turkish bath