No wonder the arts in this country are so undervalued when our leaders seem so determinedly lowbrow
It may be that a man who reads Kent Nerburn, David Cameron's favourite thinker, has no need of more, but for appearance's sake, if nothing else, it would be nice to think our premier is as well equipped as France's President Sarkozy, who recently embarked on a process of accelerated cultural improvement.
Conveniently, Cameron now has an entire summer in which to immerse himself in the classics, along with the complete works of Hitchcock and other important auteurs whose work Sarkozy likes to watch back to back. For more specific guidance, his fellow PR, Julia Hobsbawm, could be heard on the BBC's Today programme on Friday advertising a "bespoke service" for those who wish to remain au fait with cultural matters but lack the time.
The causes of Sarkozy's transformation remain mysterious. We can rule out European rivalry, Angela Merkel's tastes running more (like Mr Cameron's) to Midsomer Murders. On the domestic front, he certainly faces competition from Martine Aubry, the would-be socialist candidate, who has just promised, if elected, to increase the culture budget by 50%. But even without a spending pledge, Sarkozy's self-created reputation for vigorous philistinism was, for a long time, a gift to anyone who had ever read a cereal packet. As this group certainly includes his wife, Carla Bruni, is it possible that we are now witnessing her version of Pygmalion, with the president already said to be a credit to her bespoke service?
Given their scale, it could require some years of self-improvement before Sarkozy expunges from the record his previous offences against culture, some of them presumably designed to emphasise that his famous "rupture" from the French past was as much cultural, as in not being cultured like his predecessors, as it was political.
But to judge by Yasmina Reza's account of his campaign, L'aube, le soir ou la nuit (Dawn, Dusk or the Night), the populist clowning was more than an act. Asked if he might visit a museum on an official trip to Madrid, she records the obscene retort: "Merci. Le con te dit merci."
That as recently as 2009 Sarko was still pursuing a vendetta against a novel, La Princesse de Cl�ves, by Madame de La Fayette, is a measure of the speed, if not the profundity, of his renaissance. His grudge, I understand, was that studying this novel is pointless as well as stupefyingly boring: "I had a really hard time on her." Sales of La Princesse de Cl�ves promptly soared, while the Sarkozy resistance sported badges saying: "I am reading La Princesse de Cl�ves."
Months ago, when the Hitchcock viewings must have been in full swing, the French academic H�l�ne Cixous was still denouncing Sarkozy's pronounced hostility towards this classic as, in itself, historically significant. "This brand of calculated barbarity should remain in the annals of French history. Just imagine an English potentate breaking the good news to the people: a ban on bloody tedious Robinson Crusoe cluttering the mind."
Yes, just imagine that. It isn't easy, given that most British politicians prefer to save literary chat for the closing seconds of Desert Island Discs, but what would happen if, say, David Cameron suddenly set his face against Robinson Crusoe? Or worse, complained that his friend Jeremy Clarkson totally agreed with him and that his other literary friend, Rebekah, has always thought it a bit on the lengthy side?
Maybe we can find a clue in the response to the news that Ed Miliband does not read anything at all, on the basis that novels are "all made up". Or in the equally nonexistent public revulsion occasioned, a few years back, by Gordon Brown's advertised hinterland. The former prime minister was so gripped by The X Factor that in November 2008, when the financial crisis was being compared with the Great Depression, he took time to write to the finalists. Daniel Evans, a bereaved 38-year-old swimming pool cleaner, was the object of special concern. "On a personal note," Mr Brown wrote, "can I say that the next time Simon says that you are only supported by the over-60s you can tell him that my wife Sarah and I disagree?"
The following year, he and the leader of the opposition clashed publicly over Jedward, who Brown disliked. "You only need to watch a few minutes," insisted Cameron, "and suddenly, 40 minutes later, you're still nailed to your chair, waiting for the terrible twins to appear." Of course, with his choice of Ernie (the Fastest Milkman in the West) as a desert island disc, Cameron had already signalled an intention never to be culturally undersold. ("This sounds more genuine than Gordon Brown's fatuous claim to like Arctic Monkeys," said the Sun.)
His choice of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Cookbook as his desert island reading was also a challenge ? what next, the Boden catalogue? ? as well as being, you could now argue, intellectually consistent with leadership of a government that presides over collapsing libraries and museums. Perhaps, in the big society, Masterchef is to be all the stimulation we need. But no, according to Cameron's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, Cameron's handbag connection proves him personally committed to the arts. "He's married to someone who works in the creative industries." Next to the Camerons, you might think, earnestly discussing sausage rolls with the Clarksons, Carla and Sarko look like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Admittedly, political avoidance of the arts is now an established, cross-party tradition, following New Labour's brutish assumption that, as Chris Smith told the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins, culture was "too artsy-fartsy" for the British public to deal with. Alastair Campbell's worry, he said, was that "real people went to the football and pop concerts, not theatre or classical concerts or opera".
The only recent threat to this consensus arrived, pre-election, in the shape of Nick Clegg, confessing his passion for the fine medium-pace bowler and author, Samuel Beckett. "The unsettling idea," Clegg explained, "most explicit in Godot, that life is habit ? that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning ? never gets any easier." Plainly, this embarrassing brainiac had failed to clock that, in grown-up politics, highbrow means not having a season ticket.
Although there were no badges saying: "I've never read Waiting for Godot", the only question for those tracing the origins of Clegg's dizzying downward spiral is whether it began with this episode or a no less compromising incident in which he named JM Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K as his favourite book.
Chris Smith's successor, James Purnell, agreed on the pressure to treat the arts as an elite obsession. The feeling was, he said, "that if you'd gone on about the arts you might lose the Sun". That could certainly explain why, while the French premier has been reading himself into favour, ours has put so much effort into equally furious un-reading, in order to impress Rebekah Brooks. It would be unrealistic, in the shock of liberation, to expect him to go from River Cottage Cookbook straight to La Princesse de Cl�ves, but ? for a bespoke choice ? Nora Ephron's Heartburn has recipes as well as a story.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/24/nicolas-sarkozy-david-cameron-culture
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