WHY ARE THERE TORIES?:

Howells wages class war on Turner guests (Nigel Reynolds, 10/12/2002, Daily Telegraph)

Kim Howells, the junior culture minister, fresh from his attack on the Turner Prize shortlist* opened a new front in the class war yesterday, further distancing Labour from the sort of people it once courted.

Mr Howells described the 550 guests who attended the prize ceremony at Tate Britain on Sunday as black-shirted cultural colonists.

The minister said he had no argument with the winner, Keith Tyson, "but I think the event itself said so much about that kind of art and the way it has all been colonised by the incomprehensible classes".

*'The entries are tat. They're made badly. They're just very boring and very thin' (Rachel Sylvester, 01/11/2002, Daily Telegraph)

Kim Howells was so horrified by what he saw at the exhibition of the short-listed entrants to the Turner Prize that he could not resist pinning his reaction on a noticeboard at Tate Britain.

No sooner had he scrawled the word "conceptual bull****" across a piece of paper, however, than he panicked.

"I suddenly thought: Oh no, the notice board is probably one of the entries - I've just written on a work of art," he said yesterday.

With his spur-of-the-moment scrawl, the culture minister has prompted a furious row about the nature of art.

His description of the exhibits - which include a ceiling of Perspex squares and a billboard giving the artist's description of a pornographic film - as "cold", "pathetic" and lacking in "conviction" was received with delight and horror in equal measure.

Yesterday, as he attended a conference on "Creative Clusters" in Birmingham, Mr Howells was unrepentant.

"The Turner Prize entries are tat," he said. "They don't have any ideas and they're made rather badly. They're just very boring, very thin - there's nothing to them. This isn't difficult or challenging; the ideas are very simple." [...]

"There's been an amazing reaction from the public to what I said about the Turner Prize - everybody's been coming up to me to say, 'This needed saying'."

While the Tory Party won't come out foursquare against the EU or the Welfare State, Tony Blair is the only true hawk in either party, is fighting the unions, and his culture minister sounds like Tom Wolfe. This is the Third Way pushed farther than Bill Clinton ever dreamed. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2002 10:37 PM