Whether or not she actually said it, Margaret Thatcher's much-quoted promise to spend one summer holiday "re-reading" Frederick Forsyth did nothing for her reputation among the arts establishment. Nor, in the end, did Tony Blair's 1997 fling with Cool Britannia, a passing embrace with Britpop that soon faded.
Politicians are rarely good judges of the cultural mood, caught between the desire to sound contemporary and the greater fear of appearing elitist. Most settle for an uneasy curiosity, aware that the arts need government cheques to pay the bills, and aware too that culture is something Britain is good at, but cautious about taking the relationship further- at least in public. There are few votes to be gained from it.
Britain's politicians are not uncultured: they are no less ignorant than any other group of well-paid, busy, middle-class professionals. But an MP able to tell Mussorgsky from Mendlessohn will gain little from boasting about the fact, and one who picks the Killers for his Desert Island Discs, as David Cameron did, simply risks snobbish abuse.
Quite a bit of this abuse tends to come from the arts establishment itself, which can never decide if it wants politicians to fawn over its brilliance or stand apart as targets of its scorn. An artist tainted with Westminster's praise seems a reduced figure, less brave and less clever: so Harold Pinter takes a knighthood but still throws his hatred in the prime minister's face.
When the arts get chummy with authority, something is going wrong. That holds true for oppositions as well as governments, as Cameron seems aware, since he has been careful about his artistic boasts. He listens to the Smiths but doesn't suggest that Morrisey might vote Tory. He hasn't tried to claim cultural scalps, converts to his cause, in the way Blair did in opposition. He seems aware that they are bound to bite back.
That is why a cultural dinner he attended earlier this month was such a tame affair, a jolly evening out among artistic powerbrokers, a getting to know you session between two establishments who help run Britain rather than anything more intellectual. Organised by the shadow chancellor George Osborne and Julian Fellowes, of Gosford Park success, it did not suggest deep commitment on either side.
So nothing much should be read into it, just as in the end nothing much mattered about Margaret Thatcher's lack of interest in the arts or John Major's obsession with cricket and Victorian novels. Thatcher's ministers still went on signing cheques for the National Theatre to put on Howard Brenton plays denouncing everything she stood for, and Major set up the National Lottery, which threw remarkable sums of money at artistic reconstruction, with mixed results.
Neither got many thanks for their persistence; the arts moved on, and voters were unimpressed. Fashion matters in both culture and politics and it is not fashionable for them to mix. By the time artists and MPs have noticed each other, the artist cannot be defined as cutting edge.
