“I do so love London,” wrote the Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, who visited the city three times between 1899 and 1901, making 94 paintings. In September, an exhibition of Monet’s London paintings will open at the Courtauld Gallery, including one, Pont de Londres, that was owned by Winston Churchill. The painting was a joint Christmas and 75th birthday gift from the literary agent Emery Reves – a gift chosen to reflect Churchill’s passion for painting, not just as a connoisseur but as a practitioner.
Churchill took up painting in 1915, after losing his post as First Lord of the Admiralty following the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. He later wrote that he felt “like a sea-beast fished up from the depths… and then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue”. The muse became his lifelong companion (and perhaps beyond: “When I get to heaven I plan to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting,” he wrote).
Modern politicians love to invoke the Churchillian spirit, but the idea of an extra-political hinterland as a necessity to counter the inevitable demands of public service has dwindled, even as social media has intensified the strain of being constantly in the public eye.
Denis Healey (who, like his political contemporary, Edward Heath, played the piano “with passion, if not always with accuracy”, according to his obituary) identified what he saw as Margaret Thatcher’s lack of a “hinterland” – an absorbing pastime beyond politics – as a failing. But in modern politics the opposite seems to be the case.
The only permissible exception seems to be writing: from Disraeli to Nadine Dorries, fiction pours out of the Palace of Westminster (to say nothing of the memoirs of ex-MPs). But Churchill, himself a prolific author, made a clear distinction between relaxing hobbies and writing (or reading), which served only to further tax the over-active brain.
Search the current Westminster intake for evidence of a cultural hinterland, and a few interestingly quirky examples pop up: Andrew Bowie (Con), assistant conductor at The Garioch Fiddlers Strathspey and Reel Society; jazz saxophonist Darren Jones (Lab); Vince Cable (Lib Dem), nimble former Strictly contestant. But in a political era when the arts have been grievously undervalued, it would be good to hear the Prime Minister, a talented musician who attended the Guildhall School of Music, speak up for the crucial importance of hinterlands.
Fiscal relief
Among the facilities in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s private lavatory at the Treasury is a porcelain urinal. It is of little use to the current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who considered removing it, only to learn that the 100-year-old convenience has associations with Churchill (practical, rather than – in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s notorious 1917 artwork, Fountain – cultural), and that its removal would require listed building consent, at an initial cost of some £8,000.
There is talk at the Treasury of obscuring the item with a pot plant. But given the conclusions of the Engaged Project, which concluded in 2022 that provision of high-quality public lavatories would contribute significantly to the regeneration of the nation’s struggling high streets, the Chancellor might do better to retain the urinal – an elegant, quasi-Art Deco design – to remind her that there is more than one kind of fiscally important relief.