I have just been filling out the Marketing Questionnaire for the book I wrote during the toughest part of lockdown on the work of John Wonnacott, an artist whose paintings I have always admired ever since the National Portrait Gallery commissioned him to paint John Major, while Major was still (but only just) in office as Prime Minister, looking a bit forlorn in one of the grander rooms in 10, Downing Street, with Norma sitting in the window seat behind him. Four years later, Wonnacott himself suggested that he might paint a portrait of the entire Royal Family to mark the millennium. I thought it was extremely unlikely that they would agree, but to my surprise they did and so he painted a great set-piece portrait of them all. At the time, he was represented by Agnew’s, one of the leading Old Master dealers who had very grand premises on Bond Street. They were able to negotiate the sale of his work to both the Tate and Metropolitan Museum.

The book will be published by Lund Humphries in September.

I was more impressed by Dezeen’s list of its top ten architecture projects of the last year than I was by this year’s Stirling shortlist. The Stirling list seemed to be dominated by big projects by well-known architects whereas the Dezeen list seems to have a wider range, less metropolitan, more inventive and paying attention to originality. I was particularly pleased to see Niall McLaughlin’s Auckland Tower listed. I also like the look of the two Devon projects, both of which are lowkey and ecological. These projects are much closer to the reality of everyday architecture and it would be good if the RIBA paid more attention to this, not to what looks good in photographs.

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/12/15/british-architecture-review-2021/?s=09

In case you’re stuck for what to buy for Christmas, can I make a gentle suggestion (I hope it opens correctly) ?

https://mailchi.mp/38afd7420ebb/last-posting-date-20th-december-2021?e=9dc0f9b85b

I wasn’t really planning to write anything more about the vexed question of the Downing Street Christmas Party – or parties, as it now appears, of which it is easy to lose count, not just the one on December 18th. pre-arranged, but an endless round of champagne and quizzes, with the cameras conveniently covered by dustbin bags in case they were being recorded: so they knew they were doing something wrong.

But now I read that a report will be produced by Simon Case ‘as soon as we reasonably can’. We, not he. I thought that the whole point was that the Cabinet Secretary had been asked to produce an independent report. But now it is apparently a co-production, written jointly by the Prime Minister. A whitewash in other words. Well, we guessed that, but he might have had the grace not to make it quite so obvious.

I have been trying to think what I would do if I were in the Cabinet Secretary’s position of having to exonerate the Prime Minister from the idea, now widely held, that he may possibly have lied about the various parties held in Downing Street last year.

The obvious thing would be to bring in someone properly independent, not the police because they say there is no available evidence. I suggest Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project (ie someone who is independent, a lawyer and committed to legality in government). Then, I suggest he is given access to all the Prime Minister’s WhatsApp and mobile phone texts and messages which should anyway be in the public domain from 1 November to Christmas Day last year.

If there is no reference to any parties, and if there is no other record of drink having been ordered at public expense and no other communication with Lord Brownlow than the request for further funding which he had apparently forgotten when briefing Lord Geidt, then he could be cleared which would be good for him and for the government.

Providing of course that his records have not already been deleted as they were when he was Mayor.

In the unlikely event that you might want to hear my article about Bishop Auckland read aloud, you can listen to it in the third part of the podcast below. It sounds as if it’s a fairy story, but it’s true.

https://thecritic.co.uk/london-gossip-dickensian-christmasses-and-experimental-castles/

Having posted one bit of family memorabilia today, I am posting a second – a picture of my father which I was recently sent. He was aged 8, just after the first world war, staying with his grandparents in Hertfordshire:-

It was my brother’s funeral yesterday in the peaceful setting of The Charterhouse where he spent the last couple of years. I got a slight frisson from the picture of him reading as a child, which he went on doing for the rest of his life. It was taken in Pembrokeshire in August 1953, where my parents went on holiday in a small cottage the year before I was born. John was ten. I post it in his memory:

It probably does not need me to point out that the vile stench which is now emanating from 10, Downing Street – the sense of lie upon lie and party after party, encouraged, allowed and sometimes attended by the Prime Minister who arranged for crates of champagne to be delivered to his front door and managed himself to consume £12,500 of food and drink supplied by a Tory donor during lockdown (if you think about it, this is a lot of food for two people and a baby to guzzle) – is hardly going to be solved by a report by the Cabinet Secretary on a single party held on December 18th. Nice, decent and honourable as the Cabinet Secretary may be, he owes his appointment entirely to the Prime Minister through a system of personal favouritism rather than public appointment. This is surely part of the problem: that 10, Downing Street has been created as an independent fiefdom, operating outside and beyond the law, full of special advisors who are friends and former colleagues of the Prime Minister, his wife and Michael Gove. They were encouraged by Dominic Cummings to think outside the box and part of thinking outside the box was to hold parties when no one else could. So, there should be a proper and full enquiry. But this is not going to happen because it would be almost bound to find fault with the person in charge.

Well, this at least solves the conundrum. They obviously did have a party. Then, they childishly chose to deny it, laughing as they did so. The bigwigs, including the Prime Minister who was upstairs, presumably all knew perfectly well that it had happened and the Chief of Police decided to be lenient about it. It puts them all in a big hole for a monster cover-up.

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-12-07/no-10-staff-joke-in-leaked-recording-about-christmas-party-they-later-denied