There’s a horror story about Nadine Dorries becoming culture secretary. In “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs, a man is given a stuffed monkey’s paw and told it will grant three wishes — but he’s also warned never to use those wishes, because while the monkey’s paw is powerful, it’s also cursed. When the paw delivers your heart’s desire, it does so in such a horrific way that you will regret ever meddling with fate.
For years now, people in the arts have been wishing for the culture brief to go to someone who is actually interested in culture. In 2011, there was consternation at Jeremy Hunt getting the culture, media and sport portfolio. A PR man, of all people! How, wondered a Guardian writer, could he ever understand “the extraordinary way the arts affect individuals and communities”?
Maria Miller was called “a philistine peg in a cultural hole” by the Times. Her successor Karen Bradley was treated with suspicion over the fact that her literary passions extended to crime fiction and re-reading A Christmas Carol once a year. And then there was Matt Hancock, whose passion for the arts reached the ecstatic heights of quite liking “Galway Girl” by Ed Sheeran (in 2018, that was the most intimate thing any of us knew about Hancock, and what a blessed time it was).
In “The Monkey’s Paw”, the man wishes to pay off his mortgage: he gets the money, but it’s a pay-off from his son being fatally mangled in an industrial accident. His wife begs him to wish their son alive again: that happens too, but their son is no longer recognisably human when he returns to their home. He is merely, horribly “the thing outside”. There is one wish left: the thing disappears and the couple are left alone.
For the arts world, Nadine Dorries is the thing outside. Never before has there been a secretary of state with such a clear affinity for their brief. Dorries doesn’t just like books — she writes them, a whole string of historical novels. She doesn’t just watch TV — she’s been a primetime star. And she isn’t just a passive observer of the digital world (which also comes under her purview) — she was one of the first MPs to be active online, and started blogging in the noughties, around the time David Cameron was still making woeful “tweet”/“twat” puns.
Yes, the arts world got what it wanted, and it is terrifying. The blog? A liability, which led to her being accused of improperly claiming expenses for a second home: she was only let off when she convinced investigators that she had been misleading the public about where she spent most of her time. “My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact,” she told the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Privileges. “I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”
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