Last year, Hugh Grant announced that he was expecting a child with a woman he dated for a few months. Hugh and the lady – Tinglan Hong – became parents in late October, both of them for the first time. It was a girl. They (Hong) named the little girl Tabitha. Which is also the name of one of Sarah Jessica Parker’s twins. It’s also the name of many, many cats. Hugh only publicly revealed the name this week, as he begins to promote his voice work in “The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists”. One of the interviews – this one in The Guardian – is getting a lot of play. You’ll see why:

Hugh on the Murdoch press: “For years I used to rant and rave at dinner parties and in pubs about how a section of the media was running the country. It was always particularly revolting to me to see those people feted, courted and arse-licked by senior politicians and general London glitterati. You’d go to a Vogue party and there would be Rebekah Wade, with everyone being lovely to her, and I’d think, why is this woman invited? Why is she here?” Finding himself next to George Osborne at a dinner party before the last election, he got into such a row about Andy Coulson that their hostess had to calm things down. “Well, it was a little bit nasty,” he concedes. “A bit snippy.” And he punched Elisabeth Murdoch’s husband, Matthew Freud, at a party in a nightclub? “Er, that is true. I don’t want to go into the details, but yeah, he put chocolate cake on my shirt and I lamped him.”

He wasn‘t there for the birth of his daughter: “I was at one of the party conferences, about to give a speech,” he recalls, “and was pacing about on the end of the phone. I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital at all, because it brought all this attention down on the mother’s head. But I couldn’t really resist it, so I went on the second day.” Did he cry? “I did feel a little lumpy when I first met my daughter, yeah.” It’s only thanks to a court injunction that he can now visit her without having to navigate the pandemonium of a press pack, which he says had made Hong’s life unbearable. “Had we not got the injunction, I’m sure she’d be in China by now. She is a good person, a nice person; funny, clever, great mother. And she’s been very badly treated by the media.”

He likes his daughter: Grant never used to sound wildly keen on babies – “I don’t mind them for about four minutes,” he once said, “that’s my max. After that I can’t see what everyone’s fussing about.” So I ask if he’d been worried that he might not fall for his own. “Um, lots of people warned me about that; they said never let anyone know, but the baby period is not that exciting. But I am excited, actually. I thought, well, I’ll bluff through – but very little bluffing has been required. I like my daughter very much. Fantastic. Has she changed my life? I’m not sure. Not yet. Not massively, no. But I’m absolutely thrilled to have had her, I really am. And I feel a better person.”

It wasn’t all about him: Does he mean what Warren Beatty once said of fatherhood – that it was a relief to be no longer all “me, me, me”? “Well, I think I do feel a little less me, me, me. But then, I’ve had other family I look after; I have an elderly father who’s not very well at the moment, so it’s never been entirely me, me, me.”

He chose the name Tabitha: He chose his daughter’s English name, Tabitha; her mother chose a Chinese name, and Grant has been given a Chinese language book for beginners. “But I haven’t given it the attention it needs yet. I do know some disgusting Chinese words. They’re not entirely appropriate for baby rearing.”

Paternal pride: “There probably is some truth that one of our main functions on the planet is to reproduce, because it feels like more of an achievement than it should do. Which is nonsense, really. But yesterday I took my daughter to see my father, who’s in hospital, and all the nurses were cooing over her. And I felt, well, pride.”

He’s not reading parenting books: “There’s a lot of over-parenting, to my eye, anyway” – but plans to be “incredibly strict” on a few key issues. “Well, it would all be total hypocrisy, of course, but things like good manners and not being selfish. It’s just unattractive in a child, I don’t like it. And discipline – I do think discipline’s important. I’m very glad that I had quite a strict mother who was big on discipline, because you really cannot get anything done in life if there’s too much” – and he adopts a silly mumsy voice – “‘Oh, well, if you don’t feel like it, don’t do it, just express yourself.’ I’m not really very big on that. Especially as in the entertainment industry in particular, it really is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration – and discipline. You cannot get anything done without it.”

No trust funds for Tabitha: “No, I have the Tiger Mom. I’ll be Lamb Daddy. But also my other worry is about – and as I say, there are few things in life I believe in 100% – but another one is not giving your children money. I see nothing but f–k-ups among my trust-fund friends. It’s like 99% f–k-ups. So I would not want to do that to my children, no.”

[From The Guardian]

I have mixed feelings on the trust fund issue. On one side, by all accounts, Hugh is being very generous (financially) towards his baby-mama. He’s already bought her a $2 million house, and I’m guessing that he’s footing the bills and then some. So little Tabitha will probably never want for money, privilege, education, etc. Is the trust fund important beyond that? Meh.

As for the conversation about Hugh “liking” his daughter – it sounds a bit dickish out of context, but within the whole article, you get used to Hugh’s gift of understatement. I think that’s what it was – he was merely being… you know, English.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.