“Great and congrats on Brussels. Just Ofcom to go!”

So goes a text message sent to James Murdoch by Jeremy Hunt, just hours before the Secretary of State for Culture was appointed to oversee News Corporation’s £8bn bid to take control of the satellite broadcaster, BSkyB.

Hunt claims that this was entirely consistent with his publicly-stated position.

Oddly enough, this is probably the reason why Mr Hunt will retain his job. Because the real issue here is whether Hunt was an appropriate individual to fulfil an impartial, “quasi-judicial” role in relation to News Corporation’s bid.

And who was it that considered Hunt to be the “solution”? Step forward Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne and his boss, Prime Minister David Cameron.

If Hunt were to resign these two politicians would be dangerously exposed.

Meanwhile, it has today been reported that the cap on tax exemption for charitable giving announced by Osborne in his last budget has been dropped.

No surprise there. What is of note is the very deliberate timing of this announcement, coming as it does on the day that Hunt gives his evidence to the Leveson inquiry into media ethics and during a period when parliament is not in session.

Words like unethical, incompetent, vacillating, self-serving and undemocratic spring to mind.

Now compare those words with the ones spouted by David Cameron when launching a new draft of the Ministerial Code fewer than two years ago:

    We must be different in how we think and how we behave.
    We must be different from what has gone before us.
    Careful with public money.
    Transparent about what we do and how we do it.
    Determined to act in the national interest, above improper influence.
    Mindful of our duty.
    Above all, grateful for our chance to change our country.(1)

So, great and congrats, Dave – there is no doubt about it: you really are changing our country.

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Note

(1) Oonagh Gay, The Ministerial Code, Standard Note: SN/PC/03750, last updated 27th March 2012, available at, http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN03750.pdf.

So says the introductory panel to the exhibition “At Home With the World”. This is the title of the Geffrye Museum’s contribution to the laughably labelled “Cultural Olympiad”. The temporary display seeks to explore notions of Englishness in the domestic sphere. What – if anything – is nationally distinct about the homes of England given the ongoing patterns of “foreign influence” that pervade our public and private spaces?

This question resonates with a line of dialogue from a play that I am going to see later this evening just up the road from the Geffrye Museum:

    “All I want is the England I used to know...
    When you knew where you were and
    all the houses had gardens and
    old ladies could feel safe in the street at night.”

This understandable nostalgia is ratcheted into a gleefully xenophobic rant by a mild mannered man who goes by the name of Martin Taylor. He must surely be the most compelling and controversial character conjured up by the playwright, Dennis Potter.

His play, Brimstone and Treacle charts how monstrous Martin wheedles his way into the moribund home of the Bates family. Tensions between the unhappily married Mr and Mrs Bates are exacerbated by the condition of their tragic daughter, Pattie. She lays bedridden and brain damaged following a traffic accident.

Martin decides to quite literally lend a hand. The nature of his grotesque physical intervention led to the censorship of Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle.

Potter wrote his television play for the BBC some four decades ago. Time, however, has not diminished the shocking denouement of the drama.

So it is with a growing sense of guilty excitement that I sit in the sun-drenched café of the Geffrye Museum writing these words and waiting impatiently for the drama to unfold.

Until now I have only ever seen Potter’s work through the mollifying medium of television. The chance to come within touching distance of Dennis’ devilishly disturbing world has brought me to London and the Arcola Theatre in Hackney.

As luck would have it, the last leg of my journey to the theatre involved the number 149 double-decker bus from London Bridge station. It strikes me that the loathsome Norwegian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik should be compelled to serve out his life sentence on this bus route. He’d be driven out of his miniscule mind by the glorious microcosm of London life that is played out by a worldwide cast of bus passengers, 24-hours a day.

If it were not for the number 149 I wouldn’t have passed by the Geffrye Museum. This marvellous museum has provided the ideal preparation for Brimstone and Treacle. As a “museum of English homes and gardens”, it is filled with stage-set interiors charting a chronological sweep through English domestic history.

The Bates’ morose middle class abode of the mid-1970s would fit in beautifully as one of the room sets of the Geffrye Museum.

These museumified interiors confirm our collective obsession with “home”. Many people share the sentiments of Mr Bates: they long for a private refuge from the world flanked by a neat little garden and a street outside filled with safe-and-sound old ladies. Of course, these exact same private paradises are all too often the setting for all manner of barbarisms perpetrated by “sweet talking rapists at home”.(1)

The domestic sphere is, then, a potent mixture of brimstone and treacle. Dennis Potter makes this shockingly apparent in his brilliant play of that title. I really hope that the Arcola Theatre does justice to Potter’s helping of demonic hospitality.

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Note

(1) The Blow Monkeys, “Sweet Talking Rapist at Home”, Whoops! There Goes the Neighbourhood, 1989, RCA.

Security measures are being put into place to safeguard the much-heralded London Olympics.

It comes as a blessed relief to discover that the streets of Britain’s Megacity are to be patrolled by thousands of military personnel. The skies above will echo to the roar of attack aircraft. The waters will be awash with warships. Meanwhile, tower blocks in the vicinity will house surface-to-air missiles. Networks of surveillance cameras will monitor the streets.

And rest assured that, in the unlikely event that disturbances should occur, sonic cannons will be swiftly deployed. They will be wielded by the “tens of thousands of troops and private security guards working alongside police officers and the security services”.

But how will honest, law-abiding citizens recognize these guardians of the peace? Well, I can exclusively reveal the new-look uniforms with which they are to be issued (see image). Of course, should you be fortunate enough to come across such an operative, you will be left in no doubt.

They are just what Britain needs in these troubled times of austerity: judge, jury and executioner rolled into one.

Chief among these lawgivers is Judge Dredd of Dennis Potter Block in the Brimstone-&-Treacle Sector. He has already seen service at the first Luna Olympics.

When asked if he had a message for any olympian perps, muties, monsters and fatties, Dredd replied simply: I AM the law.

And with that in mind, let the Brit-Cit games begin!

Mark Rothko's Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) has sold at Christie's New York for $86,882,500.
This comes just a few days after a version of Edvard Munch's The Scream was auctioned for $119,900,000.
That's a combined total of $206,782,500 for a couple of bits of colourful cardboard and canvas.