T , he former culture secretary Chris Smith should surely be
applauded for agreeing to chair the Man Booker judges this year, considering the brickbats with which most of his qualitative pronouncements about the arts have tended to be greeted in the past. This year, where shall we start? With his hint, in an interview this week, that he is partial to 'books about mountains'? Or earlier, when in his 1998 book Creative Britain he discerned that as a nation `we appear to be rather good at writing'? (The grouchy Tory smarty-pants George Walden described Creative Britain, at the time, as 'an appalling book ...a small tragedy of a book ...some of the most sanctimonious bilge written about the arts in recent times. No words can adequately convey the depths of its fatuity,...') When this reporter encountered the then culture secretary at the 2000 Whitbread Awards, Mr Smith expressed himself delighted that Seamus Heaney's Beowulf had won. He hadn't, he admitted, read any of the other shortlisted books. But he'd read the Heaney? He nodded enthusiastically. 'Not cover to cover.' Onward?
Greg Dyke's admirable `cut the crap' offensive continues. The BBC is asking businesses to pay £350 each for a licence to use videos of The Office, its luminously brilliant sitcom set in a Slough paper merchants, as staff training material. Among those so far signed up: Bupa, Vodafone, Kent Police, the NHS, Safeway, and rival broadcaster BSkyll Say what you like about that great Fleet Street brute, the Mail on Sunday; it always gets its man. Not long before Christmas, as younger readers may remember, the novelist Hari Kunzru publicly humiliated the paper's editor Peter Wright, with his surprise refusal of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, which the MoS sponsors, Wright and his colleagues sat blushing through the lunchtime ceremony at the Reform Club as Kunzru's agent read a statement on his behalf denouncing the 'poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line' on immigration. Now, the whirligig of time brings its revenges. At the weekend the Mail on Sunday ran, over two pages, a shock-horror news story about 'fury' from animal-rights activists over the young artist Francis Upritchard's use of fur in her artworks (she buys vintage fur from flea markets). It added that Miss
Upritchard 'boasts openly' of having skinned and stuffed her family cat — 'It was a fat cat and its body was really hot. I put it in the freezer to make it more dead. As if in a Mafia-style warning to others, the story noted pointedly that Miss Upritchard is Hari Kunzru's girlfriend.
As I leaf idly through my copy of the Egytian Gazette, I'm struck by a delicately artful turn of phrase employed by its star columnist Manal Abdul-Aziz. 'Islamic lawmakers in Jordan and other parts of the Arab world have expressed concerns over revamped school curricula devised with the help of Unesco, fearing Western intervention and neglect of Islamic precepts,' he writes. `New textbooks are said to emphasise the ideas of tolerance, human rights and democracy,' See, Kilroy, you blundering nincompoop. That's how you do it. Got it?
More to the point. Out with the old, and in with the new. If — as was at the time of writing being presented as more or less a fait accompli — the media group which includes this magazine comes under the control of the reclusive and funkily dressed Brequou-dwelling brothers Barclay, what does the future hold? Although Andrew Neil, the former Sunday Times editor viewed as the Barclays' representative on earth, was trying to assemble an independent consortium of his own, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that he'll help them out when they take over the Telegraph Group. Management style? Aspirational, most likely. Friends treasure the image of Mr Neil, in pink bathing-trunks, dancing with abandon to the hi-NRG old-skool happy house pop anthem `Search for the Hero Inside Yourself' by M-People, featuring Heather Small. Now that Michael Portillo is no longer, as the semi-authorised biography by Michael Gove had it in subtitular form, The Future of the Right, who is the Future of the Right? Why, it's Michael Gove! The Aberdonian Renaissance man is fixing to become a Tory MP — and is, according to friends, preparing even now to undergo the battery of bonding sessions and psychometric tests that have, historically, served to ensure the all-round-stand-upguyness of Conservative candidates.
John Redwood, interviewed with new love Nikki Page in Hello! magazine, speaks wistfully of the disobliging way in which the story of his split with depressed wife Gail who claimed he barred her from the family house — came into the public domain. 'Well, of course, it was complete nonsense, but I didn't think it worth dignifying with a rebuttal,' he tells Hello! It speaks well of his ability to inspire loyalty, then, that so many unnamed friends came forward at the time to brief newspapers that Gail's account was unreliable.
Her Majesty the Queen, long may she reign over us, has been taking her mind off recent family troubles by recourse to the most healthful and admirable of all the pastimes available to humankind: assembling jigsaw puzzles. Over Christmas. I pass on for the sake of the historical record, Her Maj was curious as to the technical name for those funny-shaped pieces that high-class jigsaw makers sometimes use to break up the monotony of the boring old inny-outy knobbly bits. One of her companions duly telephoned an authority on the matter, and was able to tell her: 'Whimsies.' Holinshed, eat your heart out.
But is that enough? I'm informed that a perhaps understandably doom-ridden cast of mind has afflicted both palace and Prime Minister. In advance of the holiday season, the makers of a BBC documentary called Pompeii — The Last Day were asked by both Buckingham Palace and No. 10 to send copies on video.
Near-miss department: a friend points out that Johann Hari, the precocious geopolitical commentator, says on his website that he was 'conceived the morning before his father had a vasectomy'. Conceived — not born. Give the man the benefit of the doubt.
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