The writing’s on the wall: some notes towards a Conservative arts policy

Who’d be a proper, MSM-grade journalist, forever digging through the muck for a tiny shred of straw around which to shape something that might plausibly resemble an actual, payment-worthy brick?

As the party of enterprise, at any rate, Conservatives really ought to applaud the efforts of the Sun hack who managed to extract from a speech by Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport Jeremy Hunt MP a story entirely worthy of being set alongside, last time I looked, articles discussing people having a shower in the Big Brother House, the Army’s discovery of UFOs flitting high above Shropshire, and the vexed issue of whether tennis shorts are ’sexy’ (this latter complete with expository photos, to aid the uncommitted in their deliberations).

Admittedly, in this company the Hunt story suffers marginally from lack of colour. Titled Tory: Graffiti is so passionate (but Hunt enthusiasts needn’t worry, the usual ‘top Tory’ formula kicks in very soon thereafter), the point of the article — file under ‘Tory Gaffe’ — is to flag up an entirely unremarkable reference to the ‘thought provoking’ nature of at least some graffiti. The reference, in turn, was made in the course of Mr Hunt’s recent speech at the invitation of what ConHome described (only slightly breathless in its wishful boosterism) as ‘Peter Whittle’s increasing influential New Culture Forum‘, on the subject of Conservative cultural policy.

It’s a rich, if in some ways invariably depressing topic. Still, let’s get graffiti out of the way first.

Turmoil and Tranquility

For weeks now — actually, now that I do the sums, the word ‘months’ might be more accurate — I have been trying, and failing, to finish writing something on the subject of the Royal Academy’s current Cranach exhibition.

What keeps putting me off? The draft already runs to thousands of words. I’ve long since read, and indeed entirely forgotten, quite a lot of the catalogue.

Yet somehow, between all those fakes and forgeries, the sharp-elbowed smirking nudes describing smooth amoral S-curves in depthless space, the frankness and opacity of the portraits, the pungent obscurities of the relevant phase of reformation-era theological disputes, the politics, the sanguinary hell of the Peasant’s War, the contemplation of these problematic factors interrupted all too often by a banal hallucination in which some ominous sonderweg threads its way through dark forests to the usual, bleak, ‘inevitable’ conclusion — the sort of hallucination that always always seems to me, in itself, the strongest of arguments for formalism of the most austerely fundamentalist sort — well, err, somehow, other projects just keep taking priority. Hence, no Cranach today — nor, alas, any time very soon.

On the other hand, news of the forthcoming exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, endowed with the stirring title Turmoil and Tranquility, fills me with hope and wonder. Displaying, not before time, the museum’s famously important collection of sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish seascapes, the final result must, surely, be a marriage between beautiful painting and bracing history. (The picture above, Sailors sheltering from a clearing rainstorm by Bonaventura Peeters the Elder, shows the moral and emotional charge, none the worse for not being wildly subtle, this strand of visual culture can also deliver.) And as if further blandishments were required, the setting is the Queen’s House, Greenwich — without doubt, one of Britain’s most absolutely faultless buildings, blessed with magnificent natural light, excellent views and poignant, if not always happy historical memories.

In any event, whatever defect of personality somehow held me back from embracing Cranach more fully, propels me headlong towards Turmoil and Tranquility. Who knows, someday I may even actually post a proper review.

(Turmoil and Tranquility runs from 20 June 2008 to 11 January 2009 at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.)

‘Saved for the nation’: General Wolfe will stay in London

In the palest possible reflection of the fact that it must have taken weeks, at the very least, for news of General Wolfe’s great victory to make its way from the Plains of Abraham all the way back to the grimy magnificence of mid-Georgian London — the stuff of hand-written despatches and soldierly rumour only tardily transformed into those shared-about dog-eared broadsheets, speeches in Parliament, toasts, songs, tableaux, ‘history’ and whatever else Benjamin West might make of it all thereafter — so have I only now discovered, having once again been dragged along by an intelligent three-year old to the National Army Museum, that Schaak’s portrait of General Wolfe, about which I wrote here, has now officially been Saved For the Nation.

A very guilty pleasure: Caroline Spelman’s nanny scandal

Even more exciting than the decade-old details of a fairly obscure MP’s childcare arrangements (and anyone who wants to argue that, in the general scheme of things, the chairmanship of the Conservative Party is, per se, a major claim to public recognition really needs to shut down the web-browser now and start getting out just that little bit more) is the rift that’s developed on the right-of-centre end of the blogosphere, over the past 48 hours, regarding the matter of Caroline Spelman MP: her probity, her culpability, the embattled cul-de-sac that is her short-term political future.

On one side of the rift, exemplifying Mrs Spelman’s defenders, is Iain Dale, who, despite hardly knowing her, is confident enough of her merits to pronounce her a Decent and Honest Woman. The basic line he takes is Voltaire’s durable tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner one: Mrs Spelman was under a lot of pressure, she meant no harm, and anyway she regularised her secretarial arrangements as soon as it was pointed out to her that it did rather look as if she was using public funds to subsidise her nanny’s salary.

Sunshine now, clouds later

In London this morning, something’s definitely changed. One can feel it in the air. For the first time in weeks, the sky is bright blue beneath the softest veil of clouds and the sun is shining fearlessly, while the slightly damp air is warm enough, just, to presage the onset of our much-delayed spring.

The peaceful transfer of political power is, I suppose, so basically counterintuitive as to drive any susceptible observer, from time to time, into the arms of the pathetic fallacy. Why is it, though, that the weather on the day of any significant British election result is always beautiful? So incandescently bright and sunny, for instance, was the morning of New Labour’s apotheosis on 2 May 1997 — a sort of public holiday declared by Nature herself, apparently, to mark the long-awaited climacteric — that even Alastair Campbell, not given to gratuitous scene-setting, fought free of his own self-imposed rhetorical mode long enough to confess to his diary that this was ‘another lovely sunny day’, as indeed it was. For the losers, on the other hand, for the Tories as we wandered through that magnificent morning, bewildered and outraged and heartbroken, the sunshine only added to the air of disorientation. ‘It was not a thing done in a corner,’ the regicides said of the judicial murder of Charles I; in 1997, it was as if the consummation of New Labour’s various ambitions, more and less obvious, could only take place in very bright daylight indeed.

Pompeo Batoni at the National Gallery

He was dashing if slightly bookish — always impeccably turned out — owned a pointed brindle greyhound of delightful character, came across as refreshingly mature for his 21 years, and understood the hard-to-achieve magic spell that is companionable, genuinely sympathetic silence.

In short, he could hardly have contrasted more extremely with most of the men I knew at Cambridge, which may perhaps explain why, in the late 1980s and early 90s, I wasted so many pleasant hours in the Fitzwilliam, in a vast vaulted room where the quiet was all but hypnotic, just standing and looking, absorbing something from his taciturn company that seemed unobtainable anywhere else, but no less desirable for that. His name, I should perhaps add, was Charles Compton, the short-lived 7th Earl of Northampton (1737-1763), as portrayed in this full-length canvas by Pompeo Batoni.

A shelter, amid the flood of mortal ills
The Fitzwilliam was, in those days, as much my refuge as my nearest world-class art gallery. Those born after the early 1990s may find this hard to believe — having cut milk-teeth on a disregarded PalmPilot, lisped their first syllables into an iPhone, and, for all I know, employed some chunky plastic Bob the Builder-style Blackberry to precipitate their very first playground flame-war — but in the period of which I write, it was possible, by the simple expedient of moving from one physical space into another, to cut loose the chains that bound one, however irksomely, to the world of human communication.

Blasting & Blessing: a vernal edition

Blast:
The Diana Inquest. Did we need to spend nearly £7 million in order to be told that, no, really, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh didn’t actually order the late Princess’s execution? And yet conspiracy enthusiasts will doubtless continue to reassure each other that the inquest was an establishment stitch-up, while that arch-delusionalist Fayed, no stranger to making up unhelpful tales that ruin lives, will only have had his pitiable fantasies encouraged by this whole costly pageant. The unfortunate bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, though, really ought to sue Fayed for some of his madder accusations, if only to show him — and perhaps even the rest of us — that there really are limits to all this nonsense.

Bless:
Carla Sarkozy, not only for that charming curtsey, but also for making the case for flat shoes, simple lines, shares of darkish grey and, perhaps most significantly, the importance of impeccable manners, even for the extremely beautiful. What does it portend, though, that this startlingly successful ambassador for all things tres chic is in fact the product of northern Italy, not France?

Blast:
The Olympics. No, it’s not just track-record regarding evil totalitarian regimes, the drugging or the monopolisation of media coverage for weeks at a time. The basic concept’s wrong. Let’s scrap the present format and get back to basics: aristocratic young men, naked and glistening with oil, declaiming hymns and engaging in a bit of light sport on an enchanting hillside in Greece.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!

From the Gospel according to John, Chapter 20:

1: The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

2: Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.

3: Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre.

4: So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.

5: And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.

6: Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,

7: And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

8: Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.

9: For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.

10: Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.

11: But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,

12: And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.

13: And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

14: And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

15: Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

16: Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

17: Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

18: Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.

Briefly Noted: Sukhdev Sandhu’s Night Haunts

Why write yet another book about London? Why buy one? Why read it once it’s been bought?

The most obviously unusual thing about Sukhdev Sandhu’s Night Haunts: A journey through the London night (2007) is that it’s very small — running to a mere 140 pages, not all of them covered in prose — that it weighs only a few ounces, and fits easily into a handbag or jacket pocket. Since there is something about the incomprehensible vastness of London that breeds fat and unwieldy volumes, by creating a work so markedly at variance with the industry standard, Sandhu has already achieved a neat feat of authorial positioning. Early on, by a similar token, Sandhu effectively distances himself from he calls ‘the self-obsessed maunderings of psychogeographic writing’. So to put it more bluntly than Sandhu ever does — the author’s good manners are by no means the least remarkable facet of this in many ways compelling little volume — the diminutive format telegraphs that, no matter how well their books may sell, we are not dealing here with an Ackroyd or a Sinclair, let alone the sort of desperately heart-felt novel in which the author refuses to waste a single London thought, experience or half-forgotten borrowing from someone else’s marginally better book.

And then there’s that subtitle, pacing out the boundaries of Sandhu’s chosen subject-matter. Night Haunts comprises a series of short, interconnected essays in which Sandhu encounters, through a succession of nocturnal journeys, the human face of present-day, dusk-to-dawn London: not ‘nightlife’, for which Sandhu expresses a very fully-formed contempt, but rather the mysterious hidden life that goes on, day in and day out, when most of the Metropolis is sleeping, or at least trying to sleep.

Who’s out of tune? Ms Hodge versus the Proms

In some ways it’s a pity that culture minister Margaret Hodge’s recent speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research has already been buried under the avalanche of denunciation that her comments regarding the Proms so generously invited, as there were other aspects of it which, while no less wrong-headed and dispiriting, might have at least generated a marginally more amusing script for subsequent public discussion.

For instance, does Ms Hodge genuinely believe, as she claims in her speech, that next year marks the ‘anniversary’ of Henry VIII’s accession? And would she please explain what she means when she says that one of the key achievements of this ‘well known figure in our history’ lay in — and I’m not making this up, it’s really in the text — ’separating state and religion’? And does she ever worry that as aspirations for ‘our sectors’ go, ‘embodying common belongings’ might be a less than inspiring battle-cry? And finally, does she actually agree with the somewhat bizarre little maxim, certainly included by someone amongst her remarks, that ‘traditions are only experiments that once worked’?

Well, the discovery of ‘a shared sense of common cultural identity’ (’shared’ and ‘common’, no less) might seem a more galvanising proposition were government ministers to display a stronger grasp of language, history and tradition, almost as if these cornerstones of nationhood held any significance for them.

Instead, however, we are left with Ms Hodge’s comments regarding the Proms and the fuss that these have generated.