‘Frost & Lewis’. It sounds like a programme amalgamating two of the most famous TV detectives. The former diplomat, Lord (David) Frost, is our chief Brexit negotiator and Oliver Lewis, an expert on the Irish aspects, is his right-hand man. Until recently, they were simply considered the two best men for the job. Since the departure of Dominic Cummings, they have acquired a political role too. Close colleagues of Cummings who did not walk out with him, they stayed to Get Brexit Done, so they act as reassurance to anxious Brexiteers that the government will not throw in the sponge. Their staying also implies a threat. Dom has said he doesn’t want anyone else to leave No. 10 — yet.
Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, is a former Labour MP. In his Orwell Lecture on Monday night, he did a brilliant piece of Blairite triangulation. ‘Decolonising The Wonder House: Orwell, Empire and the Museum’ juxtaposed Orwell and Kipling and their views of empire. Hunt was quite bravely reminding people that Kipling’s father Lockwood had run the Lahore Museum along principles derived from the V&A (then the South Kensington Museum) where he had worked, and had argued the ‘philosophical, historical and aesthetic ground for the English in India to do all that lies in their power to foster her indigenous arts’. It was his father’s vision that created what Rudyard Kipling, in Kim, called ‘The Wonder House’. Hunt recognises that Kipling’s extraordinary imaginative grasp of India partly derived from this. On the other hand, he wishes to show he has no truck with imperialism, and so favours Orwell and his rejection of Kipling’s views. He seeks, against current ‘factionalism’, to enlist both men — ‘just as a knowledge of Kipling helps us understand Orwell, the reverse is also true’.
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