David Miliband seems to be becoming a little bit arty. He was one of the sponsors for MP Alison McGovern's bill last week to make cultural provision compulsory for local authorities; and he and his wife, Louise Shackleton, a violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra, have given a joint interview in the next issue of the Strad, the specialist magazine for string players. He confesses he's not a natural: "If to be musical means that you can recognise a tune, name a pitch . . . or sing in the bath without your children telling you to shut up, then I'm not musical." But he says he and his wife are united against funding cuts. And I say hats off to Shackleton, who reports that she nobbled the deputy prime minister of the Netherlands recently, "whom David knew when he was foreign secretary", and gave him what for on the Dutch arts cuts.
And how do the worlds of classical music and politics compare? According to Miliband, through his wife he was "introduced to a sphere of gossip and backstabbing that I couldn't even have imagined from my own professional career". Ouch.
