30-07-2025
Don't write off that party name just yet, Zarah Sultana
In a summer of political strife we should thank Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana for lightening the gloom with the battle over naming their new party.
Since its website is journalists made the not unreasonable assumption this was its name, causing Sultana to tweet indignantly, 'It's not called Your Party!' Rather, like the Blue Peter guide dog or that famous polar research vessel, the public were invited to make suggestions.
Mixing with the radical left as a student, I struggled to differentiate between the Socialist Workers Party (omnipresent, donkey jackets, faux working-class accents), the Socialist Party (aka the Militant tendency), the Workers Revolutionary Party (humourless luvvies like the Redgraves) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (very glamorous, later veered right and set up Spiked). Alas I never met Posadists, who believed highly evolved aliens would bring the revolution from space.
Now Sultana is saying that whatever the suggestions — which must surely include Party McPartyface — it will just be called The Left. I hate to disagree, but to attract the whole bandwidth of anarchists, Islamic sectarians, anti-vaxxers, soup-flingers and single-issue pensioners who don't fit on any conventional political spectrum, I'd stick with Your Party.
I've unnerved my colleague Matthew Parris regarding the correct present to take to a smart dinner party. Like him, I grew up outside the subtle codes of the London middle classes, absorbing them over decades by trial and error.
The rule of not taking wine applies, apparently, only to serious dinners where it's assumed your hosts will have chosen vintages to complement the food. A cheap bottle may be sniffed at and passed on round the dinner party circuit. But this practice also applies to champagne. Hosts won't serve the warm Bolly you've pulled from your bag or even look at it. They'll put it aside for when they're invited to another dinner. I'd bet some bottles of Laurent-Perrier have been regifted a dozen times.
Matthew says he sometimes buys flowers, which is acceptable. But a noted socialite tells me the really smart thing to bring is something you've grown or made yourself, like marmalade, a bunch of sweetpeas from your garden or honey from your own bees. (Perhaps Matthew could knit a scarf from llama fur.) Although she adds that her husband is proper posh 'and he never takes anything at all'.
Waiting for our ticket slot to the excellent Jenny Saville exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, we browsed the winners of the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award. The room was full of wonderful examples of portraiture, from near photographic likenesses to those echoing the lighting and drama of old masters.
I'm fascinated by how artists convey not just a person's appearance but their elusive spirit. In tune with our age, many works depicted sitters living with problems or disadvantages, including the wonderful Smaller World by Paul Wright of his mother with dementia, surrounded by her possessions, including books and a cello, whose blurry, unfinished quality convey how her brain now perceives them.
I'm not so crass as to believe a portrait should be an exact likeness, but when we reached the first prize winner, I laughed. It is a supposed self-portrait by Moira Cameron, but done in such a crude, childish style it could be of anyone. Beside me were people gawping at how, in a room packed with exquisite talent, this daubing had won. Was it mould-breaking portraiture, or like a flower show giving first prize to a turnip?
The breezy, inclusive patriotism of the Lionesses was at odds with a xenophobic construction from the BBC. We were told, repeatedly, they were the first England team to win big on 'foreign soil', as if the turf in St Jakob-Park in Basel had an odd and toxic composition, or the Lionesses had competed in the trenches of the Somme.
