“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,/ Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Are these the words which have endeared Dr Seuss’s Lorax to David Cameron as he unwinds after a hard day at the dispatch box by reading bedtime stories to his children?

In an article for national children’s activity specialist Super Camps, the prime minister said he had read and reread the rhyming book with his children.

As political placement goes, it’s a shrewd choice. Dating from 1971, The Lorax is a minor classic: though it’s not as famous as Green Eggs and Ham, it’s less subversive than The Cat in the Hat.

More than 40 years after it was first published it still feels modern, though its message is more green than blue. As Cameron wrote: “The big picture is simple: if we spoil the environment, through pointless consumption and a disregard for how we produce things, we not only damage other creatures, we wreck our own lives and prospects and those of our children.”

However, it isn’t a choice that will necessarily do him favours with his more conservative colleagues. As one rightwing US blogger wrote: “I was expecting an amusing kid’s book like Green Eggs and Ham, but what I got was tiresome environmental, anti-business agit-prop. Ugh. Almost everyone on Amazon has given it 5 stars – no wonder Obama is president.”

And what, one wonders, would his education team think of the repeated misspelling of the word bigger as “biggerer”?

Which books would you recommend to give children something to think about while observing the evergreen Dr Seuss adage: “It’s fun to have fun”?