How much worse can it get ?

We now discover that on the day the Prime Minister instructed the country in a pre-recorded message that we all must stay at home, he himself jumped into the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine to drive out to Chequers – no doubt lovely, but quite obviously against the rules which he himself had just announced to the country as a whole. Of course, there was an excuse: he wanted to join his pregnant wife. But it was the moment of total, compulsory lockdown announced and enforced by the Prime Minister’s own edict.

And now he says lamely that no-one had told him that the party in the garden was a party in spite of at least one person willing to testify on oath that he had done.

It’s utterly lamentable: pathetic, if it wasn’t so tragic.

I walked across Weaver’s Fields to the Royal Drawing School today – a pleasure in the clean January sun.

Westhope House is one of those 1950s Corbusian blocks designed by the LCC Architects’ Department as part of the Hereford Estate, a bit identikit, but not bad:-

The north side of the Bethnal Green Road looking towards two of the many new vast housing blocks:-

The steeple of St. Leonard’s Shoreditch seen from Arnold Circus:-

Smoke puffing out of the Boundary Estate:-

And on the way back, a view of the City like distant triffids:-

And one of those garages underneath the arches on Dunbridge Street:-

I was very pleased to read the attached article commemorating John Sainsbury’s amazing generosity to so many institutions through the Linbury Trust, including the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery (the three Sainsbury brothers not only paid for the Sainsbury Wing, but oversaw and organised all aspects of its construction), Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Ashmolean under Christopher Brown, and the British Museum, not to mention the role of Sainsbury’s when he was chairman in commissioning new architecture (eg the Camden branch by Nicholas Grimshaw and the Plymouth branch by Dixon.Jones) with Colin Amery acting as advisor. An extraordinary record of achievement.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/01/17/john-sainsbury-former-supermarket-boss-and-major-patron-of-british-museums-has-died-aged-94

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.