ANDREW MARR
It has been mentioned in print already, so I am not breaking confidences to confess that, yes, the first hint of Tony Blair's wish to change the Lobby system, which Trevor Kavanagh described in this slot last week, came after lunch at Chequers. Myself and three colleagues from the other broadcasting outfits had been discussing life and politics with Mr Blair. After some excellent salmon and pudding, John Sergeant had asked for a guided tour of the house: Cromwell's swords from Naseby, an amazing Rubens, a first edition of John Webster's plays, some volumes of sermons by the Revd Blair that the Prime Minister claimed not to have noticed before. All that over, we were standing on the doorstep in the sun. The PM was musing on the Lobby and what might be done. I mentally logged it at the time, but we were all really thinking about Elinor's dog. Elinor Goodman, she of Channel 4 and a good egg, had suffered a slight accident in her car on the way. Her dog, rescued from her car, had spent the lunchtime in the back of mine where he had been only a little sick. Elinor was now ensconced in the Prime Minister's study trying to arrange the rescue of her car. He was clearly late for his next appointment — saving the world, or whatever — and was getting visibly edgy. So was the car. No one was therefore concentrating much, and it was only later that I remembered the hint and decided to follow it up. In my experience, quite a lot of stories are either missed at the time or simply forgotten, and not always because of alcohol. I've completely missed a cracker or two in my time, worrying about how to justify a lunchtime wine bill on office expenses or distracted by a missed appointment. Since I've just embarked on the early stages of a book about journalism, I've been asking colleagues whether this happens to them too, and I am heartily relieved to find that it does. Even Simon Walters, the Mail on Sunday's political sleuth, confessed that he slept through the Brighton bomb at a neighbouring hotel, waking only to recall an odd dream about bright lights and helicopters. Any hack with a particularly shameful episode to confess is cordially welcome to give me a call.
Ater many months of living without a kitchen — we've been having an extension put in — the new one is here at last. I am a hugely enthusiastic cook, if not actually a good one. To stand in a kitchen with a sharp knife, scoring and hacking, chopping and dicing, kneading and sprinkling, the sun flooding in, a glass of chewy red wine to hand, and Radio Three a little too loud, is pretty much my idea of heaven. The dim purgatorial months of microwaved meals, each tasting exactly the same, whether meant to be Italian chicken, Greek lamb or Kashmiri dog cutlets, are fading from memory. As I grow older, a common condition, my tolerance for pre-cooked or complicated supermarket food decreases. It's all so riddled with crap; in some cases, no doubt, literally. So we try to buy mainly plain ingredients, use plenty of herbs and lots of oil or butter. It works, to the extent that I have killed very few of our guests over the years. Damaged, yes; poisoned, occasionally; killed, no.
Ihave been hugely enjoying the parlourgame debate, generated by the Tate Modern show, about whether Picasso or Matisse is the greater artist. It's a real argument, because they are so utterly different and yet so close, and which way you go reveals
quite a lot. I know in my head that Picasso is greater — his anger, his spiky turbulent spirit, his incessant invention — and yet I actually spend a lot more time looking at reproductions of Matisse, and am infuriated by the criticism that he is merely 'pretty'. Anyone who thinks this knows nothing about painting and the extreme radicalism and boldness of what Matisse does. Anyway, as we all argue about this, the main thing is not to miss the really once-in-a-lifetime show a bit further upstream at Tate Britain, which is the huge retrospective of Lucian Freud, one of a very few great painters, in the full sense, alive and still working today. What I suspect the show will demonstrate is that Freud's huge achievement, as a traditional master of oil paint who can be just as unsettling as Picasso, derives from a lifetime of hard work, a relentless devotion to what he does, his painterly back turned away from the temptations and distractions around him. The few big characters of modern Britain, real people of solid achievement, tend to be those who dislike the tinny chatter of the media circuit: the publicity-shy Freud Elder himself, obviously, but I think also of Mike Leigh, our greatest film director, looking like a despairing chained bear at Cannes, and the entirely admirable Jonathan Miller, who has finally fallen out with New York's Metropolitan Opera.
0 ne of the more depressing recent news snippets was the revelation that French Connection UK raised its pre-tax profits from /3.5 million to more than f19 million in the first few years of its loathsome FCUK rebranding. I find the coarse, snarf-snarf image a kind of verbal pollution and wouldn't dream of buying or wearing anything made by those people. But I'm clearly in a pathetically small minority.
Iwas much amused and cheered to read a report by Anthony Howard that my great journalistic mentor and hero Tony Bevins had, shortly before he died last year, shown Tony Blair exactly why he was leaving the Express group — throwing down a choice selection of Asian Babes, Skinny & Wriggly and other Desmond porn titles in front of a startled Prime Minister. My guess is that, of all the stories of the past week or so, the porn connection is the one that will last, simply because of the huge satirical impact it has on the authority of Downing Street. Wiser heads in the Labour party agree, which is why they have introduced a new vetting system. But in the hothouse atmosphere of the pre-election money-raising round, would even they have turned down Mr Blair's new ally at the Express?
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