The newspapers this weekend reported that, earlier this month, Conservative leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne hosted a meal at L'Etoile in London. Its purpose was to seduce the "liberal glitterati", and in particular those prominent members of the British arts and media establishment who have become disillusioned by New Labour's increasingly empty gestures towards promoting culture. Organised by Julian Fellowes, who scripted the film Gosford Park, the guests at this understated intellectual orgy included theatre director Nicholas Hytner and producer Sally Greene, influential television and film commissioners like Jane Tranter, head of drama at the BBC, and eminent broadcasters like Trevor MacDonald and Alan Yentob.
The description of this event in the Observer reads like a nightmarish variant of that game in which one fantasises about resurrecting one's favourite historical figures in order to stage an imaginary dinner-party (a game appropriated to brilliant polemical effect by Caryl Churchill's Top Girls in 1982). The prospect of being trapped at Cameron's table at L'Etoile, among the living dead that dominate the arts and media establishment in Britain, is positively dystopian. Some of the guests were apparently lured to the restaurant by the false assurance that Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren would be present, itself a sad indictment of the poverty both of the Conservatives' cultural imagination and of their ability to command attention among the "glitterati".
Its effect is of course intended to be the opposite of dystopian, though - like the famous drinks parties at 10 Downing Street during Labour's first term in government, when various half-glamorous celebrities were photographed reluctantly but sycophantically guffawing with Tony Blair, and thereby contributing to the creation of an atmosphere of the vaguest utopian optimism. The intended effect of the Tory dinner-party was to create a kind of pantheon of people who, simply because they have on this one occasion eaten canapés with Cameron, will bestow cultural capital on him. These individuals are the equivalent of figures in a frieze, before which Cameron can in future implicitly stand in order to pronounce on the arts authoritatively, even if his proposed policies have nothing to do with them, or even if he has no policies to propose.
In this respect it is like the tableau devised by the Liberal cabinet member Charles Masterman in 1914, when he mobilized a number of distinguished writers in order to propagandise for the Allied cause (as Karl Marx observed, if history repeats itself, it does so as farce). Among those who gathered on this occasion were GK Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield and HG Wells. The point of this event, briefly recalled by Stefan Collini in an article for the current issue of the London Review of Books, was surely not to create an engine of propaganda, one which could pump out Allied propaganda in the coming years, so much as to function as an act of propaganda itself. The form of this event, in other words, its purely theatrical appearance, was far more important than the content of the meeting, the ideas that it generated.
Cameron's dinner party, similarly, was name-dropping raised to the level of a quietly spectacular theatrical performance, one of which Nicholas Hytner himself might have been pleased had he directed it. There was no need for the guests at L'Etoile to talk to one another, since they were only participating in an elaborate dumb show for the benefit of the newspapers.
This is another of the Tories' attempts to apprentice themselves in the art of parliamentary politics as spectacle, and it is further evidence of Cameron's debt to the master of this art, Tony Blair. The underlying purpose of the dinner was itself to act as a kind of lure, and in this respect it served the same function, in relation to disappointed supporters of New Labour's arts policies, as the rumour about McKellen and Mirren that supposedly enticed several of those that attended it - it was nothing more than an ideological fiction.
