It seems to be the season for books about Lucian Freud because I went last week to the launch of the first volume of William Feaver’s massive and magnificently detailed biography of Freud, which he was banned from publishing during Freud’s lifetime on the grounds that it was all fiction, which it is only to the extent that all biography involves an element of invention and Freud no doubt felt, as all artists do, that what was important was not the life, however meticulously documented, but the art.

What comes across in what I have read so far is the importance of Freud’s upbringing in Berlin, part of the 1920s Berlin elite, living next door to the Ullsteins, and how early his talent was recognised, Stephen Spender inviting himself to stay in the cottage where Freud went to paint in Snowdonia as a seventeen-year old and regarded by the critic John Russell as like Tadzio in Death in Venice.

We had an event in the gallery tonight to celebrate the publication of Giovanni Aloi’s new book about Lucian Freud’s very beautiful and surprisingly numerous paintings, drawings and etchings of plant life, which are not so familiar as part of his oeuvre because they are seldom exhibited. The event was made the more interesting in that he was in conversation with Annie Freud, Lucian’s oldest daughter, who read from her own poetry, including one inspired by inheriting from her father a Biedermeier chest-of-drawers, and spoke of the experience of sitting for her portrait and her father’s deep knowledge and love of poetry, particularly some of the nonsense verse included in W.H. Auden’s anthology, The Poet’s Tongue.

Sometimes I feel that British politics is built in such a way that it corrects itself and prevents extremism; but this morning, catching up on the weekend’s op-ed pieces, I feel nothing but an extreme sense of anxiety, gloom and despondency. It seems that the Prime Minister is determined to commit ritual Hari-Kari with the country and, worse, that he still has the support of large parts of the country and a rump of incendiary MPs, including many in the cabinet, to leave Europe whatever the costs, in spite of the fact that this was not what was on the ballot paper or in the manifesto at the last election. Look at the WhatsApp message from the Rt. Hon Iain Duncan Smith, ‘We must stand fast and stand together. The Chief is right. The government has the right to demand that we do not hand power over to parliament’. In other words, they are encouraging him to ride rough shod over parliament and break the law. They are doing so in the most childish and puerile language as if it is a war game, not the fate of the country at stake.

Whether by accident or design (it looks like design), Amber Rudd has chosen to resign, not just from the cabinet, but from the Conservative party as a whole, with maximum brutality. Whereas Jo Johnson, Boris’s younger brother, chose to go quietly and with dignity (we should not forget that it was Jo who got the first class degree), Rudd has chosen to plunge the knife in by co-opting the Sunday Times. Presumably she, like so many One Nation tories, was persuaded to join the cabinet by the hope and promise of a deal, a promise which we have now all discovered was, as Cummings so delicately describes it, ‘a sham’. She was led down the garden path by continued promises and expectations of a better deal, now in ruins. No wonder she and her ilk are angry. Let’s hope that she will persuade more to join her.

I have been trying to understand the Prime Minister’s arcane schoolboy language. Luckily, there is now a great deal of information available online to help explain his description of the Leader of the Opposition as ‘a great big girl’s blouse’, which is a new one on me: the best appears in an American online publication called The Cut, which describes it as fifty-year old slang for a sissy, first used in a late 1960s sitcom called Nearest & Dearest. Now, I read that he described David Cameron recently in the discussion as to whether or not to prorogue parliament as ‘a girly swot’. I do perfectly well understand this: that only a swot might expect parliament to sit during September after a long break during August, when they are paid salaries to do so. Then, there is the picture of him being comforted on a park bench, looking like an elderly, out-of-work actor who has fallen on hard times; and the picture of him giving a speech in front of the police in which he cannot read the lines that have been scripted for him. I have to pinch myself to remember that this is actually our new Prime Minister.

The reason for looking up the Conrad review of A Little History of the World is because I had been told on twitter, which I did not know, that it was Gombrich, working as a radio monitor during the war, who informed Winston Churchill that Hitler was dead. On 1 May 1945 German radio played the slow movement from Bruckner’s 7th. symphony, as a prelude to the formal announcement of Hitler’s death at 10.25. Gombrich knew that Bruckner’s second movement had been composed in preparation for Wagner’s death and deduced correctly why it was being played (his mother, by the way, had been a pupil of Bruckner). He is said to have informed Churchill, presumably by telephone or telegram, although I notice that others claim to have done so as well.

I was reading Peter Conrad’s review of the English edition of Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World  yesterday and I was struck, for obvious reasons, by his view towards the end of his life of British attitudes to our continental neighbours, as described by his granddaughter.   Apparently, ‘Before his death, he thought that the English were perhaps warming up to this lump of land just across the channel. John Major was less hostile to Europe than Margaret Thatcher, and the budget airlines opened up a wider world. I remember him being surprised that his cleaning lady was going on holiday to exotic destinations. So he agreed to an English edition, though he didn’t live long enough to add the chapter on Shakespeare that he had in mind.’

Like everyone, I have been reading the papers, watching the television, and trying to figure out what on earth happens next, with the benefit that any predictions are almost certainly going to be untrue. But the thing which seems to be missing from the discussion is what happens to the big heavyweights of what used to be the Conservative Party. The group includes not just Ken Clarke, the father of the house, and Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, but also Rory Stewart, the cleverest and most independent-minded of the leadership candidates, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond, David Gauke, Sam Gyimah, Oliver Letwin and Margot James, not to forget Ed Vaizey, former Minister of the Arts, whose father changed parties long ago. They have all been unceremoniously booted out of their own party by a combination of threats and intimidation. They have shown themselves to be people of conscience, unwilling to be cowed by the ruthless and vengeful Cummings. So where do they go ? Of course, what would be best would be a liberal/liberal conservative working group. Surely there must be some form of reconstruction of the centre ground against Johnson’s version of the Brexit party. I think and hope that the future is interestingly unpredictable and that what this group now decides will determine the country’s fate.

We went to see Julian Stair’s pottery in deepest East Dulwich in order to admire his recent work: the font he has designed and made for St. Augustine, Hammersmith and an assortment of vessels, many in sets, simple in form, differentiated by subtle changes in shape, colour and glazing, some having a slightly archaeological character, much informed by his knowledge of ceramic history:-

I had a sudden moment of brief optimism last night, the first for a long time, as I watched the clips of the Prime Minister speaking in the street outside 10, Downing Street last night. It was as if he did not believe his own rhetoric, as the crowd bayed for his blood in Whitehall. All the puff and pomposity had gone out of him, as if he had suddenly realised that perhaps, after all, it was not such a great idea to have prorogued parliament, to have upset and alienated not just the fringes of the Tory party, but now increasingly its middle ground, those who may be anxious about losing their seats, those who were told, and believed, that he was a liberal at heart, and, instead, has thrown in his lot with the extremists, the zealots, taking advice only from a non-conservative who has moved his bunker from his father’s estate in Durham and believes that life is a war game. Maybe he will lose the election he may be about to call after all. He looked deflated.