I’m pleased to see that my forthcoming book about John Wonnacott is now advertised online (https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/john-wonnacott). It’s going to be designed by Wolfe Hall, an admirable design agency based in Walthamstow, who have recently designed the book about the Tate’s Hogarth and Europe exhibition (https://www.wolfehall.com/), so I’m looking forward to what they come up with in terms of cover, typography and layout. Should it be justified or unjustified ? I like all these detailed questions. Due out in early September.

I feel his big Royal Family portrait ought to be somewhere on display for the Platinum Jubilee (https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw16828/The-Royal-Family-A-Centenary-Portrait) if anyone has any suggestions. Maybe this year’s exhibition for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters ?

There’s a new pig in Stepney Farm:-

I notice that there is an increasing attempt by Tory politicians to shift the blame for what has been happening in 10, Downing Street onto ‘the Civil Service’, a very useful target for blame because it is anonymous and because tories anyway tend to dislike the civil service as being full of EU-supporting pinkoes. But from what I read, it was not necessarily (it may have been, but is not yet proven) the army of career civil servants in the Cabinet Office who introduced a drinking culture but a) the Prime Minister who certainly tolerated, if not encouraged and participated in it, and is ultimately responsible – it was under his rule b) the army of special advisors who were brought in by Dominic Cummings as laddish rule-busters (wasn’t Cummings himself spotted wandering the House of Commons blind drunk ?) c) the press office who were recruited from the tabloids and hosted the parties. This may be a needless distinction, but I hope that Sue Gray, a career civil servant, will investigate it.

We were nearly the only people in the stalls at the Rio in Dalston for the afternoon performance of Memoria, an immensely long and beautifully meandering and ultimately totally confusing, but mesmerising film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is held together by the authority and power of Tilda Swinton, who is called Jessica in the film, but one can think of only as herself. I haven’t the foggiest what it was ultimately all about, but it is spectacularly beautiful, even when the setting is inside a hospital or the back streets of Bogotá, ending with a long rambling sequence in which she meets a man who allows her to explore his subconscious, and maybe hers as well, but this is to suggest that the narrative is in any way resolved. It’s not. Maybe that’s what makes it hypnotic.

Since the weather was fine and in spite of warnings of high pollution, I took myself of to explore Edmonton, an area of London I know not at all.

I started at the station. To the west, on Church Street, is the Edmonton Girls Charity School, a building of 1793, now boarded up:-

All Saints, Edmonton, the local parish church is medieval, locked of course, a bit of an old village to the north of London, probably where highwaymen lurked:-

Beyond is a large area of parks and cemeteries and playing fields, leading to the New River and Winchcombe Hill:-

I ended up in Enfield to the north, where again there are bits of old Middlesex:-

I find it slightly weird watching the Prime Minister, who has obviously spent nearly his entire life from prep school onwards evading the consequences of his actions, prepare the ground for another evasion, conscripting the entire senior ranks of the government in support of his totally implausible excuse, trying to slip the knots like a practised escapologist, all of it in full view of the British public. But it is hard to believe that the majority of people will accept that he accidentally mistook a party for a business meeting and that he now feels in any way contrite, particularly if his wife was at the business meeting with a gin and tonic and if he failed to show contrition later in the afternoon. It’s an act.

I’m grateful to Bendor Grosvenor for the helpful suggestion that the dripfeed of revelations about misdemeanors could actually be deliberate on the part of Downing Street as each revelation tends to blunt the disgust at the last one.

So, we are now in danger of forgetting that just before Christmas it became clear that the Prime Minister had told Lord Geidt an absolutely obvious and barefaced lie that he had forgotten that he had asked Lord Brownlow for £80,000 to do up his flat because he had had to change his telephone – a lie so obvious that it would shame a ten-year old. The first lesson in asking for money from major donors is to keep a record of it. And he didn’t forget to arrange a meeting for Lord Brownlow with Oliver Dowden in exchange for the cash, a double transgression, which Lord Geidt was too polite to point out.

It seems to me that the revelation of the latest party in Downing Street on 20 May 2020 puts the government in a nearly impossible situation. However much we may respect Sue Gray as a very senior and experienced civil servant, she has been given a pretty well impossible task of investigating more and more parties, with more and more evidence of malpractice appearing every day, and a requirement that she hands over her report to Simon Case who is her employer and the Prime Minister who is his. So, it will be impossible for her to be impartial.

The obvious thing at this juncture should be to hand it over to the police who must have access to all the evidence. But the police themselves have thus far refused to get involved and are themselves contaminated by not having forbidden or investigated the parties going on in the first place in spite of being in charge of security at 10, Downing Street.

So, what is to be done ? It’s hard to see.

I have been following the competition to renovate/reinvent the Barbican with the utmost interest. £150 million which is the quoted cost of the project is far higher than would be required if it was simply a question of preserving and protecting the character of a major monument of the 1960s. So, the plan must be to do something dramatic and ambitious: not necessarily a bad thing, but tricky if you are dealing with the integrity of such a historically important set of buildings.

It coincides with the potential demolition of the old Museum of London, a possible move of the market traders out of Smithfield, and the opening of a new Museum of London: in other words, the total redevelopment of the heart of the City round Smithfield, Charterhouse Square and the Barbican.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro are already working on a new project for the Museum of London site. BIG are hardly known for their sensitivity to the historic environment. Allies and Morrison are good urban planners, and are working with Asif Khan, a strong combination.

It looks as though the Barbican as we know it is effectively doomed.

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/five-mega-teams-shortlisted-for-barbican-centre-renewal-contest

Deeper and deeper it goes. It is perhaps not the fact of the occasional booze-up in the Downing Street garden, but the never-ending deception, as it is increasingly clear that throughout last year the government was making rules and pronouncements as to how any form of social interaction was strictly forbidden, even at weddings and funerals, enforced by a draconian police force, whilst they were instantly disappearing into the garden for a piss-up by invitation, contravening all their own rules and which the police refuse to investigate because it happened in the past. Heads should surely roll, and it shouldn’t be that of the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary alone, but that of his boss who must, if only tacitly, have authorised it and approved it by showing up with wine and a giant smirk.

https://www.itv.com/news/2022-01-10/email-proves-downing-street-staff-held-drinks-party-at-height-of-lockdown