DIARY
GREY GOWRIE S pring has been cold and dry where we live in the foothills of the Berwyn moun- tains. I cannot remember it more beautiful, like some exile's imagination of spring. Our damson trees, common as weeds here, make blossom pure as old lace; the frog pond, by contrast, is a cauldron of sexual harassment. Things are perfect in every way, yet I feel that the metamorphoses of renewal are often most fascinating in towns. Once I visited Stockholm in April. The sun shone for the first time in months and the Swedes were in a frenzy of de- hibernation. I watched a businessman on his way to the office, stepping slow like a tall, white stork, wearing only socks, sneak- ers and bathing pants. He carried his papers in one hand and a small case, pre- sumably for his clothes, in the other. Ovid, master of vernal transformations, would have liked him.
The first shoots of the National Lottery appear at the Arts Council. We start quiet- ly: of £50 million received since January, we hand out two. The pace will quicken as completed applications pour in. Already the range and variety are huge. The town of Grimsby gets a new Steinway; a silver band, two vans; Leeds, a dance centre and the South Bank nearly a million for the start of a £60-million project. This will turn it into an arts and musical venue for Paris as well as London, three hours and two minutes' journey from the Gare du Nord. Perhaps the best news is the appearance of new money on top of lottery funds: we require 25 per cent for the bigger projects and look like getting twice that. Stephen Dorrell, in what an unkind journalist calls a rare sight- ing, and I face the press. There is an argy about the Arts Council giving my deputy, Richard Rogers, the South Bank award. (We didn't.) Dorrell answers the point well. You either have creative people on the Council, who compete for, and sometimes win, projects promoted by other bodies, or you restrict yourself to civil servants. If only we have the nerve to leave the Lottery alone for five or ten years, it will transform the artistic, civic, environmental and chari- table life of the country. The real job for Dorrell and his successors is watching the Treasury like hawks. HMT never liked the idea. Only its First Lord got it through.
Last week, the House of Lords debated arts and heritage funding. Adrian Palmer opened, reminding us he owed his presence here not just to Huntley and Palmer bis- cuits, but his grandfather's services to music. My fellow lottery distributor, Jacob Rothschild, in a fine maiden speech, point- ed out that his quango would soon have more to spend annually than the Ford Foundation and the Getty Museum com- bined. The Lords resembles another estab- lished institution, the Today Programme, in taking a positive view of public spending. Millions were added to our budgets in the course of the debate. This put me on the spot as my own career in the House was based on being a dryish Treasury spokesman. My escape was to point out the difference between pound coins and penny pieces. If you halved public spending but decided to devote 1 per cent of it to our culture, the arts and heritage interest would still get a massive uprating, as well as the chance to earn even more revenue for the country than at present. Since lottery fund- ing is restricted to capital, we need a mod- est ration of bread on a daily basis.
Looking around Pugin's inspired Cham- ber, I pondered the likelihood of a Blair reign of terror. The hereditaries are for the guillotine, fashion for the heritage notwith- standing. Already, just in case, we are pol- ishing our final speeches, to be delivered with a forgiving glance from our heavy- lid- ded eyes and the flick of invisible specks of dust from our immaculately shot cuffs. I would miss the old place, its cross-party camaraderie, its toasted buns. I served it with one distinction at least. My first job was as government whip in Ted Heath's day. Though lowly, this was also a Court appointment. You became a lord-in-wait- ing to the Queen and represented her at airports when heads of state were visiting. I had an extraordinary effect on my heads of state. All of them came to sticky ends. The Shah was deposed. President Bhutto was `It's not so much "why" as "how".' hanged. President Nixon resigned. Presi- dent Pompidou got cancer. Most spectacu- larly, the King of Afghanistan lost his throne in mid-air, through a palace coup, half an hour after I had waved him goodbye at Heathrow. No wonder they promoted me.
Taking an interest in your ancestors is generally considered snobbish. Delving into your roots is not. I hail from Wexford squires on one side, Dublin vicars on the other. So I look on myself as Irish, especial- ly as I was born and raised in Ireland and until 1983 made my home in County Kil- dare. Toward the end of the 18th century, the Hores of Wexford became entangled with the once great Scottish family of Ruthven. (One Lord Ruthven was a vam- pire and next year I have a walk-on, three- line film part as a bad Victorian actor play- ing him in a melodrama). Identifying with Ireland, I have a Scottish ancestor I am proud of. On Tuesday, I collected a Berlin plaque of her portrait. Berlin plaques are ur-Chocolate Box, sentimental renderings in porcelain of great master paintings. Maria Ruthven was married to Van Dyck. The original, Artist's Wife with Cello, hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and I visit her when staying with my in-laws. She has sharp features and long, sexy red hair like a Pre-Raphaelite model. She wears a yellow silk dress which frames both the hair and the cello. Van Dyck seduced most of the women of the court of King Charles I. This one he made pregnant. However, she was a favourite of the Queen, who put the squeeze on him. Shortly after they married, he died and the regime fell. Maria escaped with her daughter to Amsterdam. She is also Mary Magdalene in the Christ Lifted from the Cross at the Ashmolean.
Easter Sunday in Wales. The dissemi- nators of Christianity, and the political regimes which appropriated it, have much to answer for in terms of murder and may- hem. The founder knew this when he said that he came not to bring peace but a sword. Nevertheless, the early Christians were clever to shape local and regional mythologies to their purpose: a midwinter festival to cheer everyone up and now this enactment of the age-old rites of spring. I know all the arguments that reason religion away, from social anthropology to poetry to a simple fear for one's own skin. But as I drove home from the Church of Wales's celebration of the risen Christ, knowing myself flawed yet shriven, I felt happy beyond compare, amazed, only, how people get along without it, whatever on earth it may be.
Previous page
