Stay-at-home mothers need our support I have always been bamboozled by the notion of having a "lifestyle." All I know is that I have a life and it is far from stylish. My modus vivendi is not driven by a series of elegant and perceptive choices about the kind of existence I wish to lead. Instead it is motored along by simple imperatives, such as the need to eat, sleep, pay the mortgage and put shoes on my children. The rest is pure chaos, made up as I go along. This seems to be true of pretty much everyone I know. I haven't met anyone who has planned their life so brilliantly they spend all their time in their beach home necking Campari and soda, while waiting for their turn on a jet ski. How does anyone have the time, money and mental space to match their lives to an adman's fantasy of leisure time? It's true, you do occasionally hear a particular sort of focused individual declare that having children would have interfered with their lifestyle. Such statements always make me cast my mind back to the days BB (before boys) when I was equally unlikely to be driving a Porsche, buying a cream leather sofa, hanging out in Harvey Nicks or chartering a yacht off Saint-Tropez. All of which makes me even more incredulous that George Osborne would choose to say that women who stay at home when their children are small have made "a lifestyle choice." This patronising pronouncement will come as news to every full-time mother I know. None felt she was making an active decision, as in, "Shall I keep working and book a safari for Christmas, or give it all up to potter in a sandpit with Charlie!" Of course they ruddy didn't. Women who raise their infants themselves believe they are taking the only path that makes sense for the sanity and welfare of their family. It's an anti-lifestyle choice, as it means cutting back drastically on holidays, outings, expensive pastimes and any form of luxury. Despite such privations, I am always interested to note the high proportion of clever, highly qualified women in my hometown of Cambridge who take career breaks to raise their families. If professionals and academics such as these, with a zillion relevant statistics at their fingertips, believe being a stay-at-home mum is the wisest option, why is the Government so obscenely keen to bribe mothers back into the workplace? I am certainly not against mums working - I'm a wage slave myself - but a civilised society should applaud and support all those women who make sacrifices to raise secure, happy, confident members of the next generation. Instead this Government seems hell-bent on insulting them. How can they think of offering child-care vouchers to individuals earning up to £150,000? Don't they realise what an unimaginable fortune that is to the vast majority of voters? The almost certain answer is: "No, they don't." London-centric ministers and their advisers alike spend too much time at dinner parties in Clapham and Bayswater, where professionals on high salaries feel poor compared with the investment bankers in Chelsea. They shell out a fortune in income tax, the mortgage and school fees and can barely afford a second-hand Volkswagen. Of course, all financial pain is relative and you can feel just as squeezed in your south London semi as you can in a Cambridge one. But do we working couples deserve more assistance from the Government than families where one parent stays at home? The marvellous thing about the Early Years Entitlement scheme is that it's entirely democratic: all three- and four-year-olds are allowed 15 hours of free child care a week. The truly pernicious thing about George Osborne's voucher scheme is that it takes an insult hurled at full-time mothers then adds injury.