HHey there! It's that time of year again when the opaquely funded, Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust spends big money to inject right-wing candidates (including the evangelical Stephen Green, who denies the existence of marital rape and once supported the death penalty for gays in Uganda) onto the board of the hated “woke” National Trust. What do Restore Trust's anonymous supporters want? National Trust land? Coastline? Works of art? Or are they as angry as I am that it's becoming increasingly difficult to buy a commemorative thimble in the gift shop?
National Trust supporters are battling a plethora of social media accounts with mysterious blue ticks, numbers in their names and strange idioms riddled with peculiar spelling mistakes, pushing a narrative of “restoring the Trust” (the democratic process is apparently “They are manipulated by the incumbents because they hate the opposition.(“”) The Washington Post Russia gives voice to social media Shaping discourse and creating divisionIs it, after all, Vladimir Putin who wants the National Trust's delicious vegan scone recipe when it's been made with conscious margarine for years?
Anyway, get online as soon as you can, join the National Trust if you haven't already, and follow the Trustees' advice to vote en masse. Next Annual General Meeting To protect our nation's heritage and natural assets from misappropriation by a private limited company, the Restore Trust, and its anonymous donors for false purposes. Take back control! But these things are everywhere.
Despite the change of government, the hunched, battered and black-and-bruised BBC remains an outlet for right-wing talking points and, this month, has amplified the views of the Tufton Street-based Taxpayers Alliance, founded by the Leave campaigner Matthew Elliott, who was baronised in a final act of gratuitous violence against the British political establishment, having strangled Liz Truss until she was unconscious.
The BBC reported that the Tufton Street Taxpayers League has argued that bankrupt Birmingham should sell off the city's artworks, even though they are trust property and the tallest in Birmingham after the grave of one of the shortest women in history (Nanette Stocker – 83.82 cm, or 2.75 feet tall). Why not sell her body, too? Surely the excellent Victor Wind Museum of Curiosities in Hackney, East London, could find a tasteful place to display her body next to the Rolling Stones' used condoms. Or perhaps the surviving members of UB40 could be hired as sex toys for the city's creditors.
Britain's public museums are in a dire state as it is. When I last visited Peterborough Art Museum, in 2020, it was run by the fitness company Vivacity. Works by Alan Davy, Julian Trevelyan and Patrick Heron shone unnoticed, but Elizabeth Frink's masterful sculpture of a wild boar was being used to prop up a mop in the corner, perhaps the ultimate expression of William Morris's teaching that art should be both beautiful and useful.
But who do Taxpayers Alliance supporters want to sell Birmingham's artworks? John Everett Millais Blind Girl Is it still worth its weight in gold, unappreciated by the rich, in the private lobbies of bank headquarters? Ford Madox Brown's groundbreaking The end of England Will it languish unloved as a corporate asset in some far-away oligarch's vault? As good thinkers, I think we should let the market decide.
The problem for comedians and columnists trying to find the “funny” in the new government is that the misdeeds of the previous government and its attendant mysteriously funded think tanks and patronising journalists (such as Tufton Street and Laura Kuenssberg's lethargic BBC News) still ruin it all. Last Sunday night, on stage at a big outdoor stand-up festival in Manchester, I attempted to give a comedic critique of a top-tier keel, but was met with silence, so instead I decided to poke fun at a moth that had fluttered onto the stage. Sadly, the moth turned out to be funnier than Starmer. Ultimately, artists must let the market decide.
Which leads neatly into the Oasis scandal, which saw ordinary bucket-hatted spectators cheated out of £355 for an already exorbitant £135 ticket, another Conservative crime. David Davis, my least favourite of the now-discredited Brexit idiots, said: He criticized Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing.has essentially become his own publicist, so I wrote to him two weeks ago asking why he didn't object to the Conservative Party encouraging ticket price increases a few years ago. His chief of staff said he would write back. He hasn't written back. But we remember.
After being questioned in Parliament about ticket price hikes in 2011, Sajid Javid, who would become the Conservative Culture Secretary, said that those selling secondary tickets were “classic entrepreneurs” and that those complaining were “bumbling middle-class and champagne socialists who have no interest in helping ordinary working people make a decent living as middlemen.” For the Conservatives, arts and nature are just money-making opportunities. That's all. They stood by while publicly subsidized tickets for publicly subsidized venues were resold at exorbitant prices and ignored the cross-party group of MPs on ticket fraud. But Oasis fans are not bumbling middle-class champagne socialists. From prisons to sewers to tickets, the Conservatives' harmful legacy has finally become too big to ignore, but those responsible have fled the scene.
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I'd love to mock the Labour party, especially its failure to deal with the imprisonment of environmental activists, but that would be like mocking Hercules trying to wash 14 years of accumulated Conservative dung clean from the Augean stables.
In other news, former Mumford & Sons banjo player and GB News funder Paul Marshall audienceDon't expect the sly disinformation and inflammatory opinion airing under the banner of once-trusted traditional newspapers to wane anytime soon. Getting rid of the Conservatives may have cut off the hydra's head, but the tentacles of Tufton Street, Marshall and the Brexiteers are still squirming.
