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Diary

Oscar Humphries

Wednesday, 26th September 2007

London Fashion Week is one of those events, like the Lib Dem Conference and the Max Power show, that is important to a few people but passes most of us by.

‘I’m not bothered either way,’ said the man sitting next to me on Eurostar. I’d asked him if he liked art. His answer staggered me. I spend so much time trawl-ing auction catalogues, going to exhibitions and discussing art (non-pretentiously) with other addicts that I’d forgotten that some people feel about art the way I feel about football — that it’s baffling and boring. Everything I collect is destined for the house I will one day buy, but is more likely to end up with the bailiffs. Once they know you a little, art dealers offer you ‘terms’. I represent the bad debt of the art world. Every month I pay the gallery that scares me the most. I get emails and texts, and people call at the house. Sara, my fiancée, has been briefed to ignore fey plummy-sounding men when they telephone. Nothing has been repossessed yet, but I’m waiting, nervously. Pictures are so much easier to buy than they are to sell. Especially macabre drawings by minor Belgian artists. It will either end well — with a studio flat in Ealing (the new Acton) groaning with weird art. Or it will end badly with a headline, ‘Art World Brought to Knees by Art Addict Fantasist. Bank of England Steps In.’

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.